 Edinburgh singer/songwriter Rosie Nimmo releases her fourth album, “Where Time Suspends” on February 5th 2021, and the 10 tracks on this mellow and laid-back album could just be what you need to take you through the cold winter months that we have been told are waiting just behind the final blue sky days of 2020.
“Where Time Suspends” is at its heart a contemplative album that makes you want to re-look at many moments in your life as, in song, Rosie takes us from that inner child within us all to that one lost love and eventually having to come to terms with the loss of those close to us. This is also an album of Rosie Nimmo playing with different vocal styles and timings and in many cases this gives the overall work a very 1960s/1970s “soundscape” to it, so reminiscent of those days of the great singer/songwiters like Neil Young and Carole King (both credited as musical influences by Rosie on her website). We are not living in the past here though, and environmental issues and our growing interaction with online social media (and its limitations to our human psyche) also come under exploration in words and songs. There are some interesting moments being developed on this album by Rosie’s writing, and one of those is “Small Child” with the simple belief that within us all still resides the small child that we once were. If any song on this album is open to a wider exploration this is it as, for me, the small child within us all is that rock we stand upon where all our creativity stems from as we never truly lose that ability of a child to create imaginary friends, places and wonderlands. We never lose that insatiable curiosity of a child. Also in contrast to that rock of creativity, so often the pillars of sand of our childhood experiences turn into all of our adult insecurities. As Rosie so rightly says in this song, our need to be loved also comes from the small child within us all. For me “Heaven” is interesting simply because half way through the song you are taken in a direction that is a little different from where many songwriters would go, but “he was the youngest in a long list” is line that has so many other stories to tell another day too. This album is, for me, a little bit like the old A and B sides of a vinyl record as there is a definite change in the style of the album for the second half, and some of my favourite tracks are here as Rosie moves often into a more laid back Jazz vocal sound and “Laugh” is a good example of this. If I have to pick a favourite song on this album then it is “Lonely People”, and part of that reason is the way Rosie uses words here and departs from the conventional line by line construction of a song lyric. The last track on this album “Deep Peace” is a close runner up for my favourite song here, and one that leaves us all to contemplate that “lost space” that people leave behind them when they go to wherever we all go in the end whilst embracing that there is perhaps out there a wider “spirituality” to our existence. Rosie Nimmo is also developing her music on this album too, and there is an obvious love for introductions to songs based on good and solid musical principles, and for the most part this all works well. There are some intriguing uses of words on some of these songs, and words have their own colours and shapes too, and I know that this is a very personal opinion, but a few songs here seem to be just asking for a very stripped down production of just Rosie’s voice and guitar to allow the colours and shapes of the words alone to come to the foreground. Further information on this new album, Rosie Nimmo and her music is available at https://www.rosienimmo.com/ TRACK LISTING 1. Could Have Been 2. Oops a Daisy 3. Small Child 4. Heaven 5. Music is Sunshine 6. Laugh 7. Lonely People 8. Choices 9. Keyboard Warriors 10. Deep Peace Review by Tom King 30.11.20  Kim Edgar has a new 12 track album out (4th solo album), “Held”, and it is available from 11.12.20. As you would expect from one of Scotland’s most unique and gifted of songwriters, each of the 12 tracks on the album is a carefully constructed blend of words and music.
As always, Kim has that ability that I like so much in a writer of being able to write a haunting musical melody, but embed within it words of true meaning. Add to that Kim’s always matched with equally haunting and at times delicate vocals and something special always happens. I often find Kim’s music to be a little bit like sitting on a beach at the sea and looking out over the water to the horizon on a calm day. You can, if you want just sit and listen to movement of the water and let it sooth you, enjoy the melody, or you can decide to enter the water and immerse yourself in it, and let it flow all around you. When you do this with a Kim Edgar song, you quickly realise that often, hidden beneath the calm melody of the surface, there are very powerful words that so often are confronting challenging subject matters and often painful emotions head on. The songs on this new album are no exception. Kim Edgar is a writer who understands that words have enormous power and she chooses them and uses them with enormous care. Underneath the calmness of the surface melody, there is often a darkness to Kim’s work as the troubled emotions and life experiences of the people in the song are explored but, even then, there is somehow always that almost spiritual ray of light and hope trying to shine through the darkness. Not everything is bleak in the musical world of Kim Edgar though, and many songs celebrate the joy and pleasure of being alive and a true belief in the power of the human spirit to overcome all obstacles. Two songs on this album placed together illustrate this contrast of darkness and light perfectly – “Powerless” and “Waiting For A Sign”. It is not often that I review an album and cannot find a weak song on it, but “Held” simply has no weak songs. Everything about this album, from production, words, music, artwork, packaging has been assembled with obvious care and attention, and the depth of musical talent that is also on this album on selected songs including some of my favourite artists - Karine Polwart (vocals), Rachel Sermanni (vocals) Su-a Lee (Cello) - has allowed Kim to widen her musical horizons here (all socially distanced of course) and explore different sounds and arrangements to complement her own at times ethereal vocals and piano. One older song, given a whole new musical landscape with a new arrangement of brass (Mikey Owers), is the deceptively simple, but so effective when you see it performed live song “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” (co written with Karine Polwart ). Kim Edgar has a habit of writing songs that somehow get into your head and refuse to leave, and songs like “Baby Steps”, “Absent Father” and “Witness” are doing that already after just a few plays of this album. All good albums save some of the best for last, and the last two here follow in that tradition. “Perpetual Light” somehow manages to embody a larger spiritual sound and message that makes it perfect for a Christmas song, and the last song - our title song – “Held”, is an instrumental that shows how effortlessly Kim Edgar can create a haunting melody out of a basic musical structure. You can view “Held” as an album of wonderful individual stories, but it also as a complete work has much to say about the many problems that this world sadly has and particularly at the moment when so many people simply want, and need to be “Held”. HELD TRACK LISTING
Review by Tom King 21 November 2020. |
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