(2021) Sarah McQuaid - The St Buryan Sessions


Review:
Funded by 184 individual generous donors, The St Buryan Sessions are quite literally a solo concert. With gigs cancelled in the wake of the pandemic, Sarah McQuaid recorded the album (which was also filmed) without an audience (save for her recording engineer and a two-person camera crew) in the medieval church of St Buryan near her home in rural West Cornwall using ambient microphones placed throughout the building, variously accompanying herself on acoustic and electric guitar, piano, and floor tom drum. Treating it as she would a proper concert, the material spans her 24-year career. It opens to the unaccompanied ‘Sweetness and Pain’, an ode to the weakness of will when confronted by dangerous temptation. The lyrics liken the fruit and the thorns of brambles to the sometimes painful experience of love, which fully captures the acoustic magic of the setting—originally appearing as three separate snippets on 2015’s Walking Into White but here rendered in full. From the same source, picked out on acoustic classical guitar, the bluesy Yellowstone speaks of her young son’s fear about a volcano starting a chain reaction. Co-written over a decade ago with Gerry O’Beirne and featuring on her The Plum Tree and The Rose album, The Sun Goes On Rising is a fingerpicked six-minute bluesy and atmospheric piece, coming up to date with the electric guitar-based and live looped title track from her most recent studio album If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous, its dark tone belying the fact it was inspired by her young son excavating in the back garden. It’s one of five numbers taken from the album, followed directly on, switching to grand piano for The Silence Above Us, an appropriate choice given the climate in which it was recorded, and the sparse percussive hollow drum accompaniment of One Sparrow Down with its unsettling imagery of a bird trying to attack the cat seated behind the window, only to wear himself out and becoming easy prey. Arriving later in the set, the others are the brooding, atmospheric instrumental The Day of Wrath, That Day, with its hypnotic delay Ibanez guitar, the final choice being The Tug Of The Moon, a slow waltz meditation on and acceptance of mortality, here pared down to a ruminative, resonant electric guitar accompaniment. By contrast, played on fingerpicked guitar, Charlie’s Gone Home with its early Joni Mitchell colours dates back to her 1997 debut album When Two Lovers Meet, an influence that also informs What Are We Going To Do, a song about the trepidation and hesitancy embarking on a new love affair can bring which, like In Derby Cathedral, also comes from The Plum And The Rose. There are two previously unrecorded songs, both covers, branching out into new musical territory for a melancholic arrangement of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves that is soaked in the song’s heavy sadness and, back at the piano, Rabbit Hills by her late friend Michael Chapman. Michael’s wife Andru, commissioned the latter version as a gift for his 80th birthday (Michael also produced and featured on her last album). It ends appropriately, with Baez by way of The McGarrigles and Richard Thompson, the six-minute acoustic fingerpicked guitar accompanied The Last Song from her second album, I Won’t Go Home Til Morning, written as a poignantly moving memory of and tribute to her late mother that mingles sadness and joy. A superb end to a wonderful, expressive and intimate live album from a consummate performer. You can add your own applause.





Track Listing:
01. Sweetness and Pain (The St Buryan Sessions) (2:42)
02. The Sun Goes on Rising (The St Buryan Sessions) (5:55)
03. If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous (The St Buryan Sessions) (3:55)
04. The Silence Above Us (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:42)
05. One Sparrow Down (The St Buryan Sessions) (1:45)
06. Charlie’s Gone Home (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:31)
07. What Are We Going to Do (The St Buryan Sessions) (3:15)
08. Yellowstone (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:02)
09. Time to Love (The St Buryan Sessions) (3:58 )
10. Autumn Leaves (The St Buryan Sessions) (6:36)
11. In Derby Cathedral (The St Buryan Sessions) (5:35)
12. The Day of Wrath, That Day (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:10)
13. The Tug of the Moon (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:30)
14. Rabbit Hills (The St Buryan Sessions) (4:10)
15. Last Song (The St Buryan Sessions) (6:13)
16. Bonus Track (The St Buryan Sessions) (5:05)

Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, folk
Country: Spain
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