Dagger Gordon & Colin Gordon

Like Father/Like Son

(Dagger)

Dagger Gordon has arguably been Scotland’s leading mandolin player for many years and he’s clearly passed his talent for negotiating strings and frets onto his guitar-playing oldest son, Colin. The pair are captured on this splendidly intimate album playing older Scottish pipe marches, dance tunes and airs, many of them long neglected but all lent the sort of reinvigoration that perhaps only someone who cites guitar hero Alvin Lee of Woodstock-era blues-rockers Ten Years After as an early influence and has long years’ service on dance band stages around the Highlands could give them. There’s a brightness to Dagger’s picking and sound that makes melodies really sing, be they the brisk opening jigs or the gentle, beautifully stroked air of Cròdh Cinn t-Sàile, where Colin’s sensitivity and thoughtful invention shine through too. Don’t be deterred by the translation of Tha m’aigne fo ghruaim (This Gloom On My Soul) either: it’s a weepie, all right, but one with a distinctly more-ish flavour.

Rob Adams

Dagger Gordon & Colin Gordon: Like Father/Like Son (Dagger)