(2021) Duncan Lyall - Milestone


Review:
As a bassist, Duncan Lyall has been a mainstay of Scottish traditional music groups from the Treacherous Orchestra, a crowded supergroup, to the punk-folk outfit Croft No. 5, and has toured with artists from Kate Rusby to Mary Chapin Carpenter. His second solo album Milestone grows out of a commission for Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in 2019: it is a largely instrumental suite of six songs, very loosely autobiographical. Lyall eschews the bass for an array of analogue synthesisers, notably the Moog, that embody a tradition now almost as established as the ballad. It opens with a case of ennui; Lyall sitting in his tenement flat in Glasgow, unable to get started on the project, diverted by the sound of the wind in the tree outside his window. A piano melody that twists like a tumbling leaf mingles with a guitar line, momentarily recalling the soundtrack to Local Hero; then a slow violin melody brightens the mood. Lyall’s partner Lori Watson — who plays fiddle throughout — chants a mantra about counting and waiting, close to the microphone so it sounds like an intimate whisper. More energy is unleashed on “Barnacarry Bay”, recalling a party on a secluded beach two decades ago, with Jarlath Henderson’s bubbling pipes. A version of the traditional ballad “Twa Corbies”, in which two crows relish the prospect of eating the flesh of a knight recently slain in battle, starts with a stuttering Geiger counter cough of percussion; Watson’s spectral vocals float in a haze of violin. An unexpected muse for “Roli” is Lyall’s pet rabbit of the same name, apparently a devotee of Air’s album Moon Safari. The tune nods to the slow descending bassline of “La Femme D’Argent”, but the urgency of its fiddles and pipes is higher in octane than the French duo’s chilled Floydian stateliness. There is a tribute to the Treacherous Orchestra on “Z”, which starts with a drum loop over which a melody unreels to power chords on the guitar, before a thrilling, all-hands-to-the-pump, reprise of the melody of “Wind in the Trees”, now majestic rather than wistful. The closing track, “Titan”, remembers both the Glastonbury Festival (a fixture when the album was written; now a two-year gap in the collective memory) and the “rockets” with whom Lyall travelled to Somerset. The album ends with a fragmentary reprise of the opening piano figure, all the way back to that tree outside the window.





Track Listing:
1.Wind In The Trees 07:10
2.Barnacarry Bay 08:30
3.Twa Corbies 06:23
4.Roli 06:44
5.Z 06:42
6.Titan 07:47


Media Report:
Genre: electronic, folk, rock
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits