Lena Ullman and Ivor Ottley: Skating Across the Baltic

This might be the album Elizabeth Cotton would have made if she had been born in Sweden and reared in Clare. Lena Ullman – banjo player, singer, composer – possesses a less than robust voice, but she brings it to bear on songs so utterly sinuous that the match is made, mostly effortlessly. Swedish fiddler Ivor Ottley brings a low-slung, loping style to this lo-fi collection, paring the melody lines to their bare bone. At times Ullman's pacing errs on the side of lumbering (and her cover of Dirk Powell's Waterbound is an object lesson in how perfection cannot be tampered with), but the whole of Skating Across the Baltic is so much more than the sum of its parts. This is rag and bone music that takes the high lonesome tones of bluegrass, infuses them with the bereft space of our tradition, and then slows the tape reel down so that we can savour every last note. ivorottley.com