Rachel Ries, Arlington Baths, Glasgow
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
There was talk among the musicians themselves of them forming a band. A collective encore alone might have been interesting because here we had three performers with strong personalities and voices to match: Zoe Graham, the young local talent who can bring almost rock band attack as well as swing/blues subtlety to her guitar-accompanied songs; Jenn Grant, a Canadian and the winner of her country's Grammy equivalent, whose songs and voice beguile with a gentleness that can also soar; and Rachel Ries, who would have them all come back to Arlington Baths and play a concert in the upstairs games room using the snooker table as the stage.
We can only wish her good luck with that idea. In the meantime, there's as much to admire in Ries's musical armoury as there is sympathy to be felt with her inability to find anyone, even in the U.S., who has visited her home state, South Dakota. She wears her disappointment in this as lightly as she delivers her story-songs, her introductions to them having a near-musical quality of their own that in the best instances can make it hard to tell where the intro ends and the poetry begins.
Her voice is a soft instrument but with a toughness that lets lines curl off upwards as if with a life of their own and as she sang the trumpet solo from one of her records, it wasn't too much of a leap to imagine her working with a jazz band instead of just the guitar that also picked out a particular highlight in her bluesy offer to a night-time caller that she'd leave the kitchen light on.
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