Album review: McIntosh Ross

MCINTOSH ROSS: THE GREAT LAKES
****
COOKING VINYL, £11.74

RICKY Ross and Lorraine McIntosh have been partners for more than 20 years, publicly as the frontfolks of Scotpop favourites Deacon Blue and privately as husband and wife. With Deacon Blue on "indefinite hiatus" – in short, adopting a healthy "we'll play when we feel like it" attitude – Ross now makes a living writing for other singers, including Will Young and Ronan Keating, while McIntosh has forged a career as a film and television actress. But maybe they should consider working together more often because, on their first joint album, they have found yet another fruitful way of making their partnership spark.

The Great Lakes may not have the big populist, patriotic pull of Deacon Blue, whose gigs – in Scotland at any rate – are always a good excuse for a demonstrative communal outpouring of emotion. Instead, it is a triumph of a quieter, more persuasive kind.

Writing together and separately, the couple found themselves heading into folkier pastures and gradually discarding their more familiar pop style. In a further shedding of their comfort zone, they took themselves far away from Raintown to record in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, drafting in a circle of local musicians who have played with the esteemed likes of Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Sparklehorse to enhance the songs with gorgeous arrangements.

Also along for the ride was David Scott of The Pearlfishers, a man who has long explored the links between the west coasts of Scotland and the US. The results have been astutely described as "a seamless blend of Caledonia and California" but, while the sun-kissed sounds of Laurel Canyon reverberate through the recording, there are also echoes of the more antique mountain music traditions of the Appalachians and the Catskills.

The heart and strength of the album is the blend of their voices. This time, they are equal partners, supporting each other. Inevitably, McIntosh, given a more prominent role than before, is the greater revelation. Banish those memories of the cheery backing singer, adding those irritatingly catchy "woo-oohs" to Real Gone Kid, and behold a far more sensitive and sensual singer, channelling her inner tremulous Emmylou. As well as recording her first self-penned song, the soulful This World Is Not My Home, McIntosh seizes her chance to shine as a lead and harmony singer – in a most dignified manner, naturally.

She and Ross sing with such a languid grace on the opening title track, it's like trailing a hand in a millpond. The stately pace and plangent pedal steel guitar are delicate harbingers of more to come.

Bluebell Wood, a simple folk celebration of a wedding day, was apparently the song which helped steer the direction of the rest of the album, but anyone looking for lyrical insights into the couple's relationship will instead find a mainly impressionistic approach to the subject. Current single All My Trust I Place In You ("all my words and worldly goods, all my flaws still shining through") is about as explicit as it gets on here.

Most of the album abides by a less-is-more philosophy. The melancholic, yet also tentatively hopeful Walls resonates with the same haunted romance as Richard Hawley's urban torch songs. But they are capable of creating just as much of an atmosphere when they flesh out the arrangement and up the pace to a canter on the chiming country pop of Silver And Gold, which is embellished with the warm tone of the Hammond organ and spurred along by handclaps, and Mount Juliet, a wide-eyed flight of fancy which casts the postal service as "brave messengers" on a mission to deliver, whatever obstacles may lie in their path.

Oh The Dark and A Passing Place both owe a huge debt to the close harmony duets of country rock icons Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. The former is an Americana take on Show Me The Way To Go Home ("I didn't get a drink almost an hour ago and it didn't go to my head"), sprinkled with US place names, while the latter is the plaintive rumination of transient lovers – "this world is only a passing place, what little difference will one day make, we're heading off in different ways and we both know for sure there's something better beyond the passing place".

There are a couple of underwhelming tracks. Gloria, a more mainstream country number with a shopping list of kitchen sink woes, could have been made up on the way to the studio, and Winter Is Coming is more of a sketch than a song, but they still blend well into the album as a body of work, as does the bonus a cappella group harmony performance of Jesus Nailed My Sins Upon The Tree, which rounds off this beautifully understated collection in unabashed southern gospel style.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Speech Debelle

The Arches, Glasgow, 1 October

TWO weeks ago, this would have simply been a gig by a relatively unknown upcoming London rapper. But with her recent Mercury Music Prize victory, the curiosity value alone of Speech Debelle's show has rocketed.

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