Review: Trembling Bells & Bonnie Prince Billy, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Seven years ago, he produced Alasdair Roberts’s record No Earthly Man and a year later his Scottish and Irish tour, alongside Edinburgh folk outfit Harem Scarem, resulted in the album Is It the Sea?

The common element between both projects was Glasgow drummer Alex Neilson, whose regular band, Trembling Bells, Oldham at last collaborated with earlier this year on the album The Marble Downs.

Here, before a modest but passionate support, that album sprang into vivid life, with Oldham’s customarily intense performing style contrasting perfectly with the band’s sound.

The playing of Neilson and his musicians was loud but delicately nuanced, yet it was the vocal interplay between Oldham and the Bells’ vocalist, Lavinia Blackwall, which resonated most perfectly.

My Husband’s Got No Courage in Him was a highlight, a lacerating voice-only dissection of masculinity from Blackwall, with Oldham’s desultory croon of “oh dear oh” sighing away in the background, feeding straight into his incest ballad Riding, its uncanny tenderness replaced here by a kind of scorched earth blues.

In the month of Levon Helm’s sad death, it was possible to hear the country-rock style of The Band in Every Time I Close My Eyes (We’re Back There)’s bedraggled, upbeat hymnal, while an unexpected and tender version of Scott Walker’s Duchess was played in honour of Neilson’s mother’s 60th birthday.

A medley including Oldham’s There is No God and Merle Haggard’s The Bottle Let Me Down was as heartfelt as it was tongue in cheek, while main set closer Love is a Velvet Noose chimed with Blackwall’s vocal similarity to Joni Mitchell.

Rating: ****