CD Reviews

Julie Fowlis

Cuilidh | Spit + Polish

By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 16, 2008

3.0 Stars

The title (“KOO-lee”) of Julie Fowlis’s second album means “secret” (a treasure, a sanctuary, a hiding place), but the word is out on this beguiling performer from North Uist, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Sung entirely in Scottish Gaelic (with full texts and translation in the liner booklet), Cuilidh picks up where Mar a tha mo chridhe (“As My Heart Is”) left off: women wait for the men they love; women go against their parents to marry the men they love; World War I heroes fight for the land they were promised by Lloyd George (his words are likened to “mist disappearing out of sight”); the old men of North Uist have a hurley-burley; Peter Morrison survives a humorously hazardous boat trip to the mainland. There are two sets of tongue-twisting puirt-à-beul, or “mouth music” (everything from cheering Dòmhnall Bàn’s bonnet to spreading manure), where the concision of the poetic language is equaled by Fowlis’s blitzkrieg delivery; there’s a track of jigs played by her acoustic band (husband Éamon Doorley on bouzouki plus guitar, fiddle, flute, whistle, violin, viola, piano, bodhrán). Although the themes are traditional, some of these songs were written in the past half-century — which is to say that government hypocrisy and love in the face of parental opposition never go out of style. The back-up — less generic when strings or piano replace strumming at the fore — is fine, but it’s Fowlis’s soughing voice, all wind and water and machair and peewit, that’s Cuilidh’s treasure.

RACHEL SAGE + JULIE FOWLIS | Club Passim, 47 Palmer St, Cambridge | September 24 at 8 pm | $25 | 617.492.7679 or www.clubpassim.org

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Topics: CD Reviews , Club Passim

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