Reviews

The Poozies
Album: Off The Hook
Label: Schmooze
Tracks: 9
Website: https://www.poozies.co.uk/

Their first album in eight years, formed in Scotland in 1991 by harpists Mary Macmaster and Patsy Seddon, guitarist Sally Barker and accordionist Karen Tweed, they were pioneers in revolutionising traditional Scottish and Gaelic music. Today, after various line-up changes down the years (Kate Rusby once a member), they comprise Macmaster, fiddler Eilidh Shaw and Sarah McFadyen on banjo, fiddle and guitars, while the all-female roster has been gender expanded to include guitarist Mike Bryan and drummer Donald Hay.

Exploring themes of isolation, the scars of childhood, death and attempts at self-help in the bleakest of times, there's also a jazzier, and at times funkier sound, exemplified, Shaw on lead, in her staccato rhythm and vaguely Eastern European tinged self-assertive 'The Best Is Yet To Come' opener ("you can strip away everything that makes me me/But you'll never change who I was meant to be") as it encourages "get back on the horse and get back on the ride/Get back in the fray and get back in the fight, concluding "You think you spent your whole life digging your own grave/But you were paving your own way".

Written by and featuring McFadyen, the title track has a poppier folk groove to its jauntiness and again speaks to renewal and taking your life in your own hands ("Things around here ain't looking so good/Gonna pack up my bags and sling them in the boot/Fill up the car with petrol and head out on the last boat… I erased myself, I'm off the hook/Delinquency is mine for good"), although it seems a good man can still be a means of moving on while staying put ("he held me in his arms and kissed me/And I was gone, gone, gone, gone").

The first of four instrumentals, McFadyen's 'Happy And Gay' again brings the funk with its drum-driven beat, fiddles swirling around, Shaw contributing the other three, a rolling rocky fiery fiddling 'The Grape Escape', the moodier distorted guitar heavy Celtic funk 'Sausage' on which Kenny Knowles - sits in on drums, and, again with Knowles, the closing six-and--a half-minute atmospheric 'Drew's New Hoose' with its plucked acoustic guitar notes, the initial slow pacing gathering speed midway as the fiddles take charge before winding back down.

Shaw also brings two other songs, the choppy jazzy strum of 'Brian' with its admiration of an individual independent spirit ("I see you in the tearoom, cool jacket on/Like a hero, I wanna play along/Cos I see you've got it going on/And nothing ever gets you down….You're the kind of cool that everyone wants to be/Brian, do you feel there could be hope for me?"). The third is the beats-pumping Celtic pop 'Wired to the Moon' which, shifting time signatures. follows a similar thematic path ("she's wired to the moon, she's luminous cool/With Liberace's style and Peerie Willie's style …she's totally attuned, yeh she knows how to groove") as she sings " she'll match your tequilas like a rockstar/Just give it all up now, it's the fuckin ride of your life".

The remaining song, 'Lightning In A Bottle', is McFadyen's, and, while taken at a slower folksier tempo, echoes the same sentiments ("You're lightning in a bottle/I see what you can do and be/It's written all over your face/Now your world is a different place…I really think you're fuckin ace"). "Let's go out and tear it up" they sing, and they do.

Mike Davies

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