Gig review: Emily Smith, Edinburgh

Having launched her career by winning Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year title back in 2002, Dumfriesshire-born Emily Smith is now securely ranked among her generation’s leading interpreters of Scots song, latterly adding both contemporary covers and original material to her repertoire.

Emily Smith - Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

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And while her fifth album Echoes, released last month, finds her focusing again on primarily traditional fare, its finely crafted arrangements reflect influences drawn as much from across the pond as from closer to home, resulting in a sound whose echoes are often of such country-folk luminaries as Nanci Griffith or Mindy Smith, even while its vocal accents remain vibrantly home-grown, with no mid-Atlantic compromise of definition or identity.

The real revelation here, though, with Smith newly back on the road to promote the album, following the birth of her first child, was that her singing, always beautifully poised between dulcet and crystalline, has taken on stunning new depths and dimensions in terms of its expressive potency.

Whether it’s down to motherhood, or simply the cumulative fruits of hard graft and experience, there was a fresh sensuality and pulsing rhythmic force to her delivery, a thrilling injection of guts and passion, allied with her previous hallmarks of exquisite articulation, minutely nuanced phrasing and unerring intonation.

From her darkly muscular, country-blues treatment of the traditional My Darling Boy – superbly backed, as during most of the set, by her four-piece band – to her gorgeous reworking of Richard Thompson’s classic Waltzing For Dreamers, delivered solo at the piano, virtually every number was a highlight.

Seen on 08.03.14