Tim O'Brien & Darrell Scott

Tim O'Brien & Darrell Scott

Memories & Moments

(Full Skies)

Thirteen years on from their brilliantly intimate Real Time, Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott have finally found room in their schedules - O'Brien's including roadwork with Mark Knopfler, Scott's with Robert Plant - to reconvene for a follow-up studio recording. The drill's similar: two singers and pickers, whose roots go deep into America's vernacular music, sparking off each other and singing straight from the heart like old friends sharing a song and a moonshine jar on the back porch. There's a brotherly quality to their harmonising, as best illustrated by the a cappella intro to Hank Williams's Alone And Forsaken, and their voices are so lived-in and authoritative that their own songs could pass as traditional folk anthems that illustrate the fine line between the blues and church music. John Prine makes a simpatico soulful guest on his coal-dust-and-grime-drizzled Paradise, a companion to O'Brien and Scott's own nitty-gritty commentary on open cast mining's finance-driven destructiveness, Keep Your Dirty Lights On.

Rob Adams