Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The environment is not just important, it is sacred. This urge to protect the place where we live, where we play, where we exist but for a moment in time, should be fulfilling, should be overriding, and yet like an errant fisherman who places his rod over the mizzen side when the sea is teeming with cod on the starboard side, some cannot be told that the belief they hold is a mistake which could have far-reaching effects.
To be influenced by your surroundings, to feel the pull of the wave in the right direction, to know when to fish on the Farran side of the boat, is to understand you are in tune with the environment you live in. It is a situation undertaken with great seriousness and delicate performance by Maireared Green and Anna Massie as they illustrate the depths and crests of musical waves in to which the vast seas and oceans rise and fall too; for this pair of talented musicians, the song, albeit in instrumental form, is always being played and the Farran is the tune of welcome, never taking the form of a lonely ghost on deck.
To be inspired, to feel the guidance of the landscape install power into you so that you embody the point of writing what you see, is to feel authority, to witness what others around you forget what exists, often right underneath their very noses, and it is a scene that cannot be ignored for long.
As the music strikes out with impetuous, as reels and turns like a whirlpool caught in the process of churning and devouring all that surrounds it, so tracks such as Wee McGhee’s, The Merton Set, Jamie’s, Brewery and La Rachoudine devour the resistance to opening your soul and seeing through another person’s eyes; in the end the whirlpool may pull you under but instead of being critically overwhelmed by the experience, the hand that comes down from the fishermen pulls you to safe, calm waters, waters in which the beauty of the bay in which Maireared Green and Anna Massie have shown you in song, becomes an enticing and remarkable reality.
An album of much spirit and which casts a net far and wide over the Scottish and Islands music scene, to go Farran in any waters is the place where the fish will bite, and the listeners will come to enjoy the music.
Maireared Green and Anna Massie’s Farran is released on August 31st via Shouty Records
Ian D. Hall