By Fiona Shepherd

Published 22nd Apr 2025, 18:47 BST

Updated 22nd Apr 2025, 18:53 BST

Tide Lines: Glasgow Love Story (Tide Lines Music) ★★

Willie Nelson: Oh What A Beautiful World (Legacy Recordings) ★★★★

Màiri Morrison & Alasdair Roberts: Remembered In Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (Drag City) ★★★★

Locked Hands: Safety Is Our Focus (Errant Media) ★★★

Glasgow is getting a lot of love from its musical denizens in its 850th year. First, Deacon Blue embraced the Raintown once again on latest album, The Great Western Road, and now Tide Lines celebrate the dear green place where the band first formed in 2016.

Glasgow Love Story was actually recorded on their native Mull but with eyes directed towards their adopted home. The landscape may contrast with their previous Mull-inspired album An Ocean Full of Islands, with the sound inching ever closer to mainstream pop, but lyrically the territory remains the same – wistful/rousing odes by youngish men who seem perpetually nostalgic.

The hopeful Better Days communicates the sense of the city’s folk sessions with some added bassline swagger while the synthesizer on The Hardest Miles sounds like it has been switched to bagpipe setting. They add a brass fanfare to Scotpop number Brother and an unexpected saxophone solo on Lonely and the Free, but that is it for curveballs.

The rest of the album is pipe-and-slippers stuff, from cosy Clydeside romance on By the Quayside via the folk pop whimsy of the title track to the banal nostalgia of If I Had My Time. Homeward Bound is a standard spin on the homesick blues and they go river shallow, mountain mid-range on Mountains That We Climb.

Cherry Blossom Sunset’s evocation of city park life just about gets by on natural catchiness but simply name-checking locations, as they do on Ashton Lane (“we were younger when we walked down Ashton Lane”) doesn’t really get to the heart of the city.

Like his peers Van Morrison and Neil Young, Willie Nelson is releasing albums at a rate of knots. His latest, Oh What A Beautiful World, arrives on the eve of his 92nd birthday and celebrates the songs of the great country writer (and Emmylou Harris associate) Rodney Crowell. Nelson has already showcased his affinity for Crowell’s music, with his heartfelt cover of The Border a highlight of his recent output; here again he chimes with the simple integrity of the storytelling. Forty Miles From Nowhere captures the melancholic pleasures of a quiet, remote existence (“friends don’t call like they used to, for reasons not unkind”) with sighing steel guitar embellishment. The tone varies with the bluesy strut of She’s Back in Town and the California dreaming of Still Learning How to Fly, while a lovely loping arrangement tempers the sentimental Shame on the Moon and Crowell himself joins Nelson on the title track.

Màiri Morrison & Alasdair Roberts follow up their 2012 collaboration Urstan with another collection of traditional songs in English and Gaelic, this time collated by folklorist Helen Creighton and recorded by Nova Scotian bassist Pete Johnston who invited Morrison and Roberts to work with him on his home turf.

The results are a bridge between old and new Scotland on perennial themes – migration, marriage, love and longing. Roberts leads in seasoned storytelling style on the slow march of Hind Horn and the spindly lovesick Peggy Gordon, while Morrison aces Hi horò, 's na horo h-eile, a Gaelic waulking song to a tune more familiar from Ae Fond Kiss.

Locked Hands is the latest outlet for Edinburgh-based DIY musician Sean Ormsby who also records as retro electro outfit Night Noise Team. Safety Is Our Focus is a more lo-fi and austere affair, featuring reedy cut-and-paste dispatches on grief and mental health. Ormsby intones like Alan Vega of Suicide over terse, tinny beats, bass judder and throbbing synth on Echo Hotel, while S’il Vous Plait is a death dub disco of sorts.

CLASSICAL

Errollyn Wallen: Orchestral Works Resonus ★★★★

Appointed Master of the King’s Music last year, Errollyn Wallen – who lives in an isolated Scots lighthouse – had already gained international recognition as one of the topmost performed living classical composers. In an album of works written over two decades, the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor John Andrews illustrate the instinctive eclecticism that gives Wallen’s music its instant accessibility and charm. Dances for Orchestra, premiered in 2023 by co-commissioners the SCO, is a perfect and substantial example. Within a framework of skilled craftsmanship, mercurial energy and imaginative colourings, vivid influences come and go – shades of Latin, hard-edged rock, parodic wit, even an ultimate undisguised nod to Scots dance. And that’s just the start of an adventurous track list that includes the intensely theatrical Shakespearean setting By His and by St Charity (soprano Ruby Hughes), and – launched with a hair-raising quote of Amazing Grace – the powerful Mighty River Ken Walton

FOLK

TRIP: In Terra’s Keep (TRIP Music Records) ★★★★

A nimble, Glasgow-based septet, TRIP’s award-winning members hail from Scotland, Ireland, Northumberland and the Isle of Man. Their second album opens with a cracking reel pairing by guitarist Alasdair MacKenzie and pianist Rory Matheson, whose urgent piano sets the pace before Isla Callister’s fiddle then Michael Biggins’s accordion skip in. A minor quibble is that their set titles can seem puzzlingly at variance with their component tune names, but their often exhilarating instrumental approach is a winning one, leavened by three songs from MacKenzie, including his up-tempo, contemporary folk hymn The God Song, as well as an intriguing cover of Status Quo’s Blessed Are the Meek. It’s their instrumental prowess and considered arrangements that shine, however, as in the sturdy Sutherlands set, the unhurriedly swinging jigs of Not A Cloud while, led by Tiernan Courell’s flute, the closing August Ascent combines lightness and muscle. Jim Gilchrist

Album reviews: Tide Lines | Willie Nelson | Màiri Morrison & Alasdair Roberts