Take Me Out Drinking Tonight is latest effort to feature Annie Grace. Hailing from Scotland, she has spent the past decade plus in various bands including new wave folkies Iron Horse and The Usual Suspects. When the former called it quits in 2001, Annie took to the stage and appeared in several plays including Accidental Death of An Accordianist, The Celtic Story, and Miniatures. Take Me Out Drinking Tonight marks her return to the world of music.
Armed with her silky voice and an arsenal of whistles, she enlisted the help of fellow folkies for this, her debut solo release. It features Gavin Marwick playing fiddle, Davy Cattanach on percussion, Aaron Jones on bass, and Aly Macrae playing everything else including acoustic guitar, mandolin, and harmonium.
Having said all this, I can also say that the highest praise I have for this album is that is it inoffensive. But only just.
It’s not that Grace has a poor voice because hers is beautiful. It’s not that the musicianship is poor because it isn’t. The problem here is that everything sounds so antiseptic, so rote. It isn’t until the last song, “Sing Me Something Simple,” that anything approaching genuine emotion emanates from my speakers. In fact, it’s a wonderfully intimate performance with just Grace’s voice accompanied by Macrae on piano. The singing is alternately hushed & pleading and soaring.
After “Sing Me Something Simple” ended and my speakers fell to silence, I felt a bit like the typist in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I turned and looked at my coffee mug hardly aware that the album had finished. My brain allowed one half-formed thought: that’s done – I’m glad it’s over.
(A few listens later…)
On the plus side, the mix of contemporary and traditional tunes works well. They sit aside one another in harmony – there’s no great contrast between the old and the new. “Magdalen Laundry” has a fairly catchy melody but Grace’s voice never soars when it should. It remains just above a whisper. The title track maintains a rather dulcet tone throughout while I kept expecting it to rise to more of an anthem. I can’t help but wonder how someone like Nancy McCallion would have done the song.
The one tune that has genuinely grown on me is “Land O’ The Leal.” It starts off with gentle acoustic guitar and slowly builds. A passage towards the end of the song features an insistent guitar line with a simple drum beat. Grace’s voice and fiddle swirl around one another with mandolin dotting the soundscape. It’s almost trance-like and is a good example of a traditional song being given a new lease on life with a modern arrangement.
Normally when I encounter music so generally colorless, I perish any thought of listening to anything else by the same musician. Oddly enough, this was not so in this case. When Grace puts her mind to it, she can create some musical excitement and belt out a heartfelt bit of song. Unfortunately, there’s precious little of that here.
(This was originally published at The Green Man Review back in 2003-08.)
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