Analysis: The Scottish Album of the Year longlist

The previous winners

Kathryn Joseph scooped the SAY in 2015 for her debut album Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I’ve Spilled and almost made it a double last year as a member of Out Lines. She features this year with her equally mesmerising solo follow-up From When I Wake The Want Is, a dark catharsis for piano, voice and drums.

Aidan Moffat and RM Hubbert have won separately, Moffat taking the first SAY Award with Bill Wells and guitarist Hubbert hot on his heels the year after. Here Lies The Body goes as you might expect, setting Moffat’s immersive, insightful, sardonic storytelling against Hubbert’s hypnotic fingerstyle guitar.

The returning nominees

A heap of this year’s nominees fall into this category, attesting to their consistency of output (or the default tastes of the nominators, myself included).

The Twilight Sad have already attracted the support of their peers for their latest It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, which is brooding business as usual, while the blessed Edwyn Collins is on tip-top pop, soul and garage form on Badbea, recorded in his clifftop studio in Helmsdale in Sutherland.

C Duncan and CHVRCHES have made it to the shortlist before with both of their first two albums. Chvrches have gone from commercial strength to strength, enlisting uber producer Greg Kurstin for a number of tracks on Love Is Dead, while the brilliant Duncan worked with Elbow’s Craig Potter to produce Health, another exquisite collection of layered pop compositions.

Kilmarnock trio Fatherson have made it as far as the longlist with their two previous albums. Their third album Sum Of All Your Parts is a bolder pop/rock affair and could be the beast to make the leap from longlist to shortlist.

Auntie Flo, aka Glasgow-born, London-based DJ and musician Brian d’Souza, is another two-time nominee who has straddled shortlist and longlist. Radio Highlife widens his musical horizons further with a smorgasbord of world music influences harvested on his travels, incorporating field music and studio sessions from Cuba to Cape Town into his soulful house music jams.

Karine Polwart is likewise no stranger to the SAY Award – or awards in general – and her latest, Laws of Motion, is another gem in her acclaimed catalogue. She shares the honours for this meditation on migration with her musical partners, brother Steven Polwart and fellow singer and multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson.

Glasgow electro pop duo Free Love also have SAY form in their prior incarnation as Happy Meals. Along the way, they have seamlessly preserved their party instincts and communal spirit on the playful variety pack of Luxury Hits.

By any other name

Aidan O’Rourke, who has previously been nominated as a member of folk power trio Lau, was inspired by James Robertson’s short story collection, 365, to write a fresh fiddle tune every day for a year, and has collated some of that material on the double album 365: Volume One.

Carla J Easton, meanwhile, enjoyed a brush with SAY in 2017 as a member of Teen Canteen. Her latest solo album, Impossible Stuff, started to take shape at a songwriting bootcamp in Banff, Canada and came to fruition in the Montreal studio of Arcade Fire producer Howard Bilerman, who encouraged her to create her own Caledonian girl group wall of sound.

Idlewild member Andrew Mitchell can also be squeezed into this category, nominated in his solo guise as Andrew Wasylyk for The Paralian, an evocative album of instrumentals created in residency at Hospitalfield House.

As can rock nominees Mastersystem, a band of brothers comprising the late Scott Hutchison and Grant Hutchison of former SAY nominees Frightened Rabbit, and Justin and James Lockey of Editors/Minor Victories who described themselves as “four bearded men in their thirties, making an album [Dance Music]they are immensely proud of”.

The new kids on the block

This year’s longlist contains a number of first-time folk nominees including popular party band Niteworks, nominated for their second album of folk/rave fusion Air Fàir an Là, the Glasgow-based string band supergroup Kinnaris Quintet, featuring members of The Shee, Shooglenifty and Salsa Celtic, with their debut Free One and BBC Radio 2 award winner Brìghde Chaimbeul, showcasing the Scottish small pipes on her debut The Reeling, which was produced by her fellow nominee Aidan O’Rourke and also features 82-year-old singer and piper Rona Lightfoot.

The sound of jazz Scotland

There are also nods for a couple of young guns on the grassroots jazz scene, a testament to the fertile breeding ground of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s jazz course. The Fergus McCreadie Trio are helmed by a Young Jazz Musician of the Year finalist and piano ace whose propulsive, Celtic-flavoured compositions populate their aptly titled debut album Turas, which translates from Gaelic as journey, trip or tour. McCreadie crops up again as a member of Graham Costello’s STRATA, whose debut OBELISK is the absorbing product of their thrilling fusion sound honed at a monthly residency in Glasgow’s alternative rock bar Bloc.

The classical renaissance

Despite Anna Meredith’s win in 2016, classical music has struggled to make its mark on the SAY Award but finally, after a three-year drought, a classical album has made the cut. Edinburgh guitarist Sean Shibe attracted breathless notices for the seductive timbres of his debut album, Dreams & Fancies, while Steve Reich has acclaimed Shibe’s recording of

his Electric Counterpoint on nominated follow-up softLOUD as “the best ever.”

Vote for your favourite album from the longlist at www.sayaward.com between 12 and 14 August. The winner of the 2019 SAY Award will be announced at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 6 September