Review: After the accolades comes the elbow grease. Having contested a Young Scottish Traditional Musician of the Year final, won the Up and Coming Artist of the Year title and released her first album, Maeve Mackinnon, is getting on the folk-club circuit.

Star rating: ***

After the accolades comes the elbow grease. Having, in fairly quick succession, contested a Young Scottish Traditional Musician of the Year final, won the Up and Coming Artist of the Year title at the Scots Trad Music Awards and released her first album, Don't Sing Lovesongs, to enthusiastic reviews, Maeve Mackinnon, right, is getting on with the perhaps more prosaic but profile-sustaining fare of the folk-club circuit.

A singer from a committed folk music household who studied Gaelic singing with the estimable Kenna Campbell at the RSAMD, and has done her own background boning up at the School of Scottish Studies and elsewhere, Mackinnon has gathered a strong repertoire of Gaelic songs from the islands, which she intersperses with Appalachian ballads and revitalised Irish favourites, including a Wild Rover far removed from the beery popular singalong of yore.

She is well served by her musicians, guitarist Innes Watson and double-bassist Duncan Lyall, who provide varying but apposite accompaniments - now gently but emphatically rocking, now giving narratives a staccato boost - and adding a darkly searching sombreness with bottleneck and bow as Mackinnon sings of a sweet but mournful sorrow.

Mackinnon's intonation isn't always entirely secure. Her Silver Dagger, learned from Dolly Parton, wandered a mite, for example. But she has an attractive lightness of touch, gliding nicely over another Appalachian melody, The Diver Boy, and illustrating pibroch's influence on a fine unaccompanied lament. Her informative presentation adds to the impact of heady Gaelic ballads, where boy meets girl and inadvertently bumps her off, and a township's womenfolk sing to hide a warrior's cries as doctors remove an arrow.