Night Visiting: reviews
http://www.netrhythms.com/reviews.html#bella
Singer and fiddle player Bella started out with that somewhat unwieldy young Folkworks supergroup The Pack, then did a stint with the trio Ola, after which she attained Young Folk Award finalist status back in 2004 and 2005, since when she's been reducing audiences to stunned silence with the dynamism of her solo performances.
These have been relatively few in number, however, and presumably she's been able to devote a commensurate amount of time and thought to the difficult task of producing a credible debut solo album. Night Visiting is the result, and it brightly showcases Bella's musical talents while also demonstrating her ability to select and arrange material which really suits her performing style.
Bella's singing is both strong in itself and strikingly maturely characterised, with a bold confidence in expression wherein she fearlessly sets forth her own personal interpretation of the texts. Night Visiting isn't just a collection of songs with a quasi-thematic connection either: it's a convincing sequence of "journeys of love lost and found", which includes some very enterprising choices alongside the half-expected ones like All Things Are Quite Silent and Searching For Lambs. Kristina Olsen's poignant Heart Hill stands out, forming a passionate and superbly hypnotic centrepiece for the disc.
Bella sings Molly Vaughan unaccompanied, her phrasing a mixture of decorated grace and forward thrust giving the necessary momentum to the narrative.
Then there's what might be seen as the CD's token "concession" to the poppier side of folk (and I don't mean that unkindly!), with a distinct touch of the Bill Jones/Kate Rusby about the arrangement of (and incorporation of a waltz by Kathryn Tickell into) Bella's own Brontë-esque sharp riposte Alone, Jane?.
Her treatment of the local Derbyshire song Down In Yon Forest is a veritable mini-cantata, with a keen harmony vocal by Joe Hardy: this song, along with a handful of others on the disc, benefits from a richer canvas with (among other things) an extra fiddle part.
For although the CD's focus is firmly on Bella herself, as it should be, she's enlisted a few key friends to help vary the texture; she's chosen well, with Chris Sherburn's darting concertina counterpointing Bella's insistent fiddle stabs on a dramatic version of Young Edmund and Helen Bell's viola and Debbie Chambers' fiddle providing Bella with a darkly sensuous and vital string-section on Maying Song. There's also Corrina Hewat's harp embellishing the album's bookend tracks (the stark, traditional-sounding Three Black Feathers and a fairly resigned but effective fresh take on Bonnie Susie Cleland). Other featured helpers include Hazel and Emily Askew, Joey Oliver (from 422) and Hannah James (of Kerfuffle).
On the evidence of this CD, Bella's welcome to night-visit my CD player any time!
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