Music review: Out Lines and Hamish Hawk

ON THE final night of this year's Celtic Connections, Twilight Sad frontman James Graham and former Scottish Album of the Year Award winner Kathryn Joseph said a (hopefully temporary) farewell to their own Celtic connection as they prepare for their own individual releases later this year.

Out Lines, featuring Kathryn Joseph, Twilight Sad frontman James Graham and Marcus Mackay

Out Lines and Hamish Hawk

St Luke’s, Glasgow

JJJ

ON THE final night of this year’s Celtic Connections, Twilight Sad frontman James Graham and former Scottish Album of the Year Award winner Kathryn Joseph said a (hopefully temporary) farewell to their own Celtic connection as they prepare for their own individual releases later this year.

The pair have duetted previously at a couple of collaborative events but a commission from Easterhouse’s Platform arts centre to turn local stories into songs has resulted in a more formal pairing as Out Lines, alongside Joseph’s regular wingman and producer Marcus Mackay, showcasing their contrasting but eminently compatible voices against a backdrop of piano, harmonium and drums.

Joseph is the bolder, more distinctive singer with a strident yet sensitive soprano. Graham boasts a rich baritone in the somewhat apologetic indie angst style, yet he exhibited a natural feel for a folk melody on a hearty pagan pastoral number and the trio barely baulked at vaulting straight from Easterhouse lore to Abba’s Lay All Your Love On Me which they covered in grand melodramatic style, enhanced by wheezing harmonium.

There was also appealing support from Hamish Hawk, a polite, charming Edinburgh-based one man band with a “highly Googleable name” who has already found favour with the likes of King Creosote and James Yorkston for an engaging set of songs to lean in to. He unleashed some heroic acoustic strumming on Tooting Broadway but was generally a gentler soul with a direct eloquence to his music.

FIONA SHEPHERD