Robin Denselow 

Rachel Newton: Changeling review – haunting vocals and elegant harp

The folk musician’s second solo record is an inventive concept album based on Scottish folk tales of changelings, writes Robin Denselow
  
  

Folk musician Rachel Newton
Inventive … folk musician Rachel Newton Photograph: PR

Rachel Newton is a workaholic, even by British folk standards. It has become customary for our best musicians to work on a several different projects, but this singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist plays with the Shee and the Emily Portman Trio, has been touring with the quietly brilliant Furrow Collective, and can be heard on the excellent new Elizabethan Session album. She is also a soloist, and her second album is an inventive concept set, based around Scottish folk tales of changelings – the offspring of faeries, secretly left in place of a human baby. The device allows her to demonstrate her haunting vocal work and elegant harp playing on Gaelic ballads and her own compositions. The best track, the quietly minimalist and spooky When I’m Gone, segues into a delicate instrumental piece for which she switches to viola and is joined by fiddle and cello.

 

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