Top Floor Taivers

A Delicate Game

TFT

TOP Floor Taivers have been gathering a reputation around the folk club scene for their clear interpretations of songs from both the Scottish tradition and contemporary sources and for a bright, cheerful collective sound.

Between the four constituent members they come with quite a track record, featuring as they do the 2015 BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year, singer Claire Hastings and one of the harp tutors on the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Scottish music course, Heather Downie. Their colleagues, fiddler Gráinne Brady and pianist Tina Jordan Rees already have a splendid recording to their name as a duo, 2015’s High Spirits, and much of the instrumental character here comes from Brady’s gutsy and well-judged playing.

Hastings takes lead vocals, conveying the opening Johnnie o’ Braidieslee’s eventful storyline with the assistance of dramatic accompaniment and tempo changes, and there are fine four part harmonies elsewhere, notably on the intro to Andy M Stewart’s colourful Ramblin’ Rover. If Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows sounds a little rushed, there are examples of good pacing in The False Bride and Hastings’s nursery rhyme adaptation, 10 Little Men, where electro-acoustic experiments add a novel touch.

Rob Adams