Liane Carroll - Seaside - The Scotland Herald

Jazz singer Liane Carroll has been clear that she knows Bring Me Sunshine from the same comedy context as the rest of us, but only someone of her skill could transform it as she does on this superb set of songs: even the dreadful "Never bring me any tears" rhyme slides past in her soulful reading. And surely only Carroll could follow that with a rootsy reading of Page and Plant's Nobody's Fault But Mine (from Led Zep's Presence album) that features a fine sax solo from Julian Siegel.

Much of the loosely oceanic-themed Seaside is in an R'n'B vein, closer to Mary J Blige than you might expect from a native of Hastings by the sea. Mary Gauthier's Mercy Now has fine horn arrangements by Evan Jolly, while Malcolm Edmonstone brings piano and brass arrangement to Dimitri Tiomkin's Wild Is The Wind, those sitting alongside sparer readings of I Cover The Waterfront, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin's My Ship, a breakneck-speed Almost Like Being In Love and the hymn For Those In Peril On The Sea to close. Taking its title from a lovely original composed for the singer by Joe Stilgoe, and immaculately produced by James McMillan (not that one), this is not only Carroll's best disc, but one of the finest non-classical releases in the Linn catalogue.