This perfectly bundled mini package tour rolled into Glasgow with both acts having new albums to promote and they both did a swell job of selling them to the good sized audience who turned up on a miserable rainy night. Hannah Aldridge seems to have found favour with Glaswegians with several reminiscing before tonight’s show of an especially raucous gig a few years back while the front row was packed with a bunch who had seen her the previous night in Stirling and who fully intended to be at her next show in Edinburgh.
Aldridge’s new release is a live album recorded in London with a varied cast of musicians and one of the acts featured on the disc is The Goat Roper Band from Wales and it’s the Goat Roper’s who are both the support act and her backing band on this tour. Having met at a show in Liverpool some years back they’ve kept in touch and met up just before this tour for a rehearsal before hitting the road. It’s a fine example of one of Aldridge’s creeds, “The undying love of music without boundaries,” as this blend of Welsh raggle taggle and southern soulful Americana fit together perfectly.
The Goat Roper’s played the first set with several songs from their new album, Tall Grass, featured. A very hirsute trio with a 1970’s Ladbroke Grove look to them, they’re an energetic bunch, kinetic on stage with double bass player Tom Davies particularly intriguing as he caresses and dances around his instrument. His brother Jim, plays a mean acoustic guitar, wringing the notes out while Sam Roberts keeps the rhythm going on his acoustic guitar. Straddling R’n’B, rockabilly and country (with a particular bent for those old cosmic country days) the band were in great form with Desert Flowers, Ask For Alice and Whiskey Lullaby all performed, the latter allowing them to show off well their harmonies which surely draw from the well of The Everlys. Best of all was Don’t Mind The Rain, the closing song from Tall Grass, which meandered wonderfully with skeletal guitar and offbeat harmonies. A chap standing next to your reviewer said it was as if The Grateful Dead had stumbled into Dylan’s Basement Tapes sessions, and that just about describes it. They closed with a hi-octane rumble in the shape of High Heel Blues with Jim Davies almost ripping his guitar strings apart.
After a short break, The Ropers’s were back on stage with Ms. Aldridge for her set. Her performance, stripped of the studio sheen of her albums, allowed her words more space to impress but there was no let up in the fury on several numbers. Explaining that although she is influenced by classic writers from the seventies she is a child of the nineties and it was the likes of Smashing Pumpkins who she grew up with, she sang a song from her favourite of that period, the late Chris Cornell. It was Audioslave’s Like A Stone and she imbued it with a fearsome power as it grew in intensity with Jim Davies’ guitar playing impressive. Her own songs didn’t lack intensity as she rubbished an ex boyfriend on Old Ghost and delved into history for Born To Be Broken, written after she read about Andrew Jackson’s slave mistress and her sad demise, the song soaked with southern sadness. Lie Like You Love Me, a co-write with the late Randall Clay was masterful as it hit the spot straight from its arresting opening line.
The band left Aldridge on stage for a solo set which included a grand thrash through Howlin’ Bones, an excellent hard scrabble Razorwire and a song Aldridge wrote with her Muscle Shoals songwriter father, Yankee Bank, a good old-fashioned tale of civil war bitterness. The boys in the band were back up for the set closer, Burning Down Birmingham, a city Aldridge confesses to not being too keen on (that’s Birmingham, Alabama folks so breathe easy down south). As is her wont, Aldridge invited audience members on stage to sing along with her and with the volunteers in place they delivered a stripped down version which was much more affecting than the studio version. There was room for an encore which included a cracking version of Gillian Welsh’s Red Clay Halo before Aldridge said farewell by way of Don’t Be Afraid which opened like a lullaby before ascending into a thrashing crescendo of guitars. A great end to a grand evening.
A long standing favourite on the Scots live music scene, Roseanne Reid at long last delivers her much anticipated debut album which she spoke about when Blabber’n’Smoke interviewed her back in 
Tall Grass, the third album from Welsh “Cosmic Country Blues” trio, The Goat Ropers, finds the band in fine form with a swell collection of songs which allow their fairly unique line up of two guitars and a double bass to shine. Singer Sam Roberts’ voice can take some time to bed in but it actually fits the loose limbed and occasionally ramshackled approach the band take as they root around various varieties of roots music. At times they can be quite forceful, driving a song along with a powerful punch. Elsewhere, they can wander endearingly through an eccentric melody like a band of hippies in search of the lost chord.
On her excellent third album, Danni Nicholls offers evidence that she continues to grow as an artist while she has also taken the step of recording the album with a selection of female musicians and studio technician under the aegis of producer Jordan Brooke Hamlin. Hamlin built her own studio in Nashville to suit female artists and she has previously recorded The Indigo Girls and Lucy Wainwright-Roche there. The Melted Morning is a major achievement with Nicholls singing a number of glorious careworn ballads, all given lift with excellent arrangements ranging from southern soul touches to shimmering string arrangements. A couple of the songs are less orchestrated and more reminiscent of her earlier work and throughout the album her voice is never less than magnificent.
One of Canada’s secrets until his breakthrough album of last year, Nonsense and Heartache, Jerry Leger is one of those artists who believes in getting the music out there, putting in the groundwork and letting his gigs spread the word. Indeed, last year when he was appearing in Norway around about the time of his birthday, he managed to get the promoters to find him a “cool pub” to play in on that date, “Just to play some music and have a hang afterwards.” His first UK tour last year was a success and he’s coming back for more dates this month and this limited edition retrospective will only be available on CD at the shows although it is available as a download purchase for those not able to attend.
Let’s cut to the chase here and say that Amour is an album any right minded fan of American roots music should buy. It’s up there with Ry Cooder in the reclamation stakes, old chestnuts revived and, not so much tidied up, but given a fresh wind in their sails and expertly performed. Amour is the brainchild of the renowned Canadian guitarist Colin Linden of Blackie & The Rodeo Kings and Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars (and son of the infamous Jim). Together they have chosen a ragbag of vintage love songs plucked from blues, country, soul and rock’n’roll and recorded them with an ace band – Fats Kaplin, Bryan Owings, Dominic Davis and Kevin McKendree – who they have dubbed The Tennessee Valentines. To cap it they also enrolled several singers (Ruby Amanfu, Sam Palladio, Jonathan Jackson, Rachel Davis and Billy Swan) to sing the songs. Linden and Dickinson play the guitars and what a swell job they do. Dickinson describes their work ethic thus. “Colin and I are fellow guitar slinging, peace loving, freedom fighting romantics who jump at any and every opportunity to play guitars together… we both plugged into a shared guitar amp and though you can hear the different guitars popping thru here and there, it’s hard to tell who is playing what.”
Following on from her successful foray into southern music on 
It was back in 2015 when 
The Pete Gow we’re acquainted with is the frontman of 
Released just prior to Johnny Dowd’s upcoming European tour, Family Picnic has been touted as a slight return to the sound and themes of his earliest albums with less of the tortured electronic skronking which informed his last couple of releases. Certainly Dowd’s idea of family values is not the same as someone like Thatcher or Reagan would have espoused as his families are composed of folk who are like rabbits caught in a headlight, catastrophe rushing towards them. And while the album continues to sound as if it’s been washed in an acid bath, the drums and vocals scarified into the songs, the guitars and keyboards misshaped by the process, by Dowd’s standards it does go some way back to that weird American Gothic which was celebrated in Jim White’s film, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. As Dowd sings on the closing number, “I sing songs of lust and depravity, that’s the only kinda songs come out of me,” and that just about sums it up.