Music
Sarah McDougall, Woodend Bowling and Tennis Club, Glasgow
Rob Adams
THREE STARS
Grandmas are recurring theme at the moment with the singer-songwriters who stop over in Glasgow for the admirable Sounds in the Suburbs' small-scale promotions. On Friday past at Arlington Baths, the Vermont-based South Dakotan Rachel Ries was singing her ultra-resourceful grandmother's praises and here, back on the Jordanhill promoter's home turf, Swedish-Canadian Sarah McDougall led the packed audience on a chorus dedicated to hers.
McDougall likes to involve her audience. They can be asked to join in on conventional singalongs, as above, or add clapping impetus to her rockin' in rhythm fingerpicked guitar locomotion. Or - and they didn't need much encouragement on this one - she can ask them to cry like wolves. This was brave of McDougall since the previous song had resulted from her being stranded in a forest cabin where she could only use the outhouse during daylight hours due to the presence, she was convinced, of threatening fauna.
She comes across as a generally cheerful soul, singing and playing with enthusiastic gusto, and while her guitar didn't seem to have quite recovered from the long journeying that brought her from the Yukon for this first gig of a European tour, leading to uneven pitching in places, she delivered two bright, largely optimistic sets. Her subject matter roams freely from her early hero, the playfully superhuman Pippi Longstocking to occasionally darker elements such as organised religion's attitudes to gay people and the creeping effects of far-right politics. She even sang a song in Swedish and overrode any language barrier with her percussive guitar playing driving an impassioned vocal that got the message across phonetically with force of personality.
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