Last year, for the first time since exploding onto the scene with This Is The Life in 2007, Amy Macdonald took a break from all those music industry chores that have turned Bishopbriggs's favourite daughter into an international star with four million album sales.
Batteries recharged, she returns clutching a set of songs written in more relaxed circumstances – and clearly she's landed sunny side up.
Life In A Beautiful Light is, from its title down, an album that shines with optimism. The songs are bright and breezy, shamelessly commercial and inescapably catchy, with new single Slow It Down leading the way.
Lyrically, Macdonald isn't afraid of tackling big subjects, often bridged by simple shared humanity (Old Firm sectarianism in The Green & The Blue, the Chilean miners' rescue in Human Spirit, the Egyptian uprising in Across The Nile). She's no Billy Bragg when it come to political expression ("But the green and the blue/Come between me and you/On a Saturday afternoon"), but let's cherish the fact that, at the tender age of 24, she's determined to champion the positive in this messy world we live in.
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