The Forest is the Path by Snow Patrol review: 'band hit 30th birthday in slim, trim trio form'

Lady Blackbird: Slang Spirituals (BMG) ★★★★

Astrid Williamson: Shetland Suite (Incarnation Records) ★★★★

Erland Cooper: Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence (Mercury KX) ★★★★

Following the departure of rhythm section Jonny Quinn and Paul Wilson in 2023, Snow Patrol hit their 30th birthday in slim, trim trio form, with Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid coming together in Somerset to produce their first new album in six years.

Rather than respond in the moment to the line-up shake-up, The Forest is the Path benefits from mellow reflection and the benefit of hindsight. The Keane-like keen of All is an exhausted plea for someone you still care about, The Beginning a somewhat self-flagellating apology for past transgressions infused with the band’s customary chiming embellishments and intimations of scale.

They haven’t turned their back on stirring pop/rock – the pounding Hold Me In the Fire and the fleet Years That Fall will please fans of their alt.rock roots – but Lightbody sounds different, accessing a softer tone than his previous braying which is far more effective than his habitual straining for emotion.

Having said that, he insists on using a quavery falsetto to pick some emotional scabs on These Lies (“love is just pain in reverse” goes the thought for the day) and reverts to the tedious balladry of Talking About Hope just when it seems the band might have turned a musical corner.

Lady Blackbird knows how to use her mighty pipes. The artist born Marley Munroe has a lifetime of singing experience, starting in church. And to church she returns for the expansive gospel soul of Let Not (Your Heart Be Troubled) which opens Slang Spirituals.

Munroe ranges all over the soul map with supreme control, from the pastoral jazz of Man on a Boat and stripped back acoustic ode Someday We’ll Be Free to the sleek conscious soul of The City and uplifting R&B number If I Told You. But she really raises the stakes with two psychedelic epics, the electronica-embellished Whatever His Name and the brooding spiritual jazz of When The Game Is Played On You.

Brighton-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Astrid Williamson also returns to her roots for her own beloved heritage project. Shetland Suite is a tribute to her mother who taught her the songs she revives here, sung mostly in Shetland dialect with additional knee slapping and table knocking.

There is a soothing nursery rhyme quality to Baloo Balilli and an intimate simplicity to the percussive work song chant of Boannie Tammie Scolla, but Williamson also dives into deep harmonies on Unst Boat Song, applies haunting chimes to Da Narrowa Wheel and mines the mysticism of Da Full Rigged Ship before climaxing with the pretty orchestral sweep of Unst Bridal Song.

Then from Shetland to Orkney to hear the new Erland Cooper album, which was literally unearthed near Stromness after its composer destroyed all digital copies and buried the master tape. A local couple followed Cooper’s treasure hunt clues, dug up the tape reel and the sole surviving recording of Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence was dusted off and “recomposed” for our digital delectation.

It’s an audacious concept but thankfully the music is as rewarding as the story. This three movement work for solo violin and string ensemble was composed to mark the centenary of Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, whose voice is sampled throughout, and recorded without rehearsal by Cooper, sprightly soloist Daniel Pioro and the Studio Collective, whose eddying strings sound like swarming birds. The music becomes ever more majestic, like an epic drone shot of a dramatic coastline, before dipping into quieter, darker territory in the second movement.

Not everyone will welcome the fuzzy dips in sound quality resulting from its earthly sepulchre but it is an essential part of the character of a piece literally embedded in the landscape which inspired it.

CLASSICAL

RSNO: Our Gilded Veins (Linn) ★★★★

Here is an album rich in contrast, from the explosive ecstasy of Jay Capperauld’s Our Gilded Veins - essentially a concerto written for, and played superbly by, RSNO principal flute Katherine Bryan - to the valedictory simplicity of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ lyrical Farewell to Stromness, softened further in this affectionate strings arrangement by violinist Rosemary Furniss. In between, Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms is a heart-warming tribute to her late mother, coloured by string densities reminiscent of Tippett; James MacMillan’s For Zoe, a moving tribute to the late RSNO cor anglais player Zoe Kitson, is contrasted with his rousing Death of Oscar; and a ghostly clamour of bells imbues Martin Suckling’s Meditation (after Donne), commemorating the end of the First World War, with a haunting pathos. In all this, the RSNO play eloquently and glowingly under conductor Rory Macdonald. Ken Walton

FOLK

Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton: Anna Bhàn (Shadowside Records) ★★★★

Each an established artist in her own right, harpist Rachel Newton and piper-accordionist Mairearad Green are cousins whose mothers hailed from Wester Ross’s Coigach (where Green grew up). This heartfelt collaboration salutes the memory of their great-great-grandmother, the eponymous Anna Bhàn, who was involved in the largely women-led resistance against clearance in 1852-53, one of a few such actions which led, ultimately, to the Crofting Act of 1886. Their singing tends to be low-key, the title track accompanied by gently rolling harp and accordion in affectionate tribute to Anna herself, while the adamant Not Today Not Tomorrow is virtually a Gaelic chant intoned hypnotically over a piobaireachd-like pipe melody. Ceit Bheag is a stately march of remembrance for another resistance leader forced off the estate, while the album closes with smallpipes signalling in dignified defiance: Tha Sinn an Seo – “We Are Here”. Jim Gilchrist