music : recordings : scribbled in chalk : scribbled in chalk - about the songs

Karine Polwart’s songs are not the introspective stuff you might expect from a female singer-songwriter steeped in the folk-roots scene. Indeed she takes what’s best in the genre, its understated honesty and its lyrical observations on our place in the world but writes and performs with the sensibility of a musician as influenced by guitar pop hooks, indie and alt-country as she is by the folk tradition.

Like the best of its predecessor “Faultlines”, Karine’s album “Scribbled in Chalk” balances despair with hope and wit with wisdom. Her brooding bluesy “Hole in the Heart”, draped in dark, discordant strings, captures the uncertainty of a world in which “truth is a story scribbled in chalk just an hour before the flood”; a thread she develops in the disarmingly tender address to a child “Daisy: There Are People in This World Who Don’t Think Like You Do” and in the morally unsettling filmic imagery of the fragile “It All Comes Undone”. It’s timely and quietly pointed stuff.

Meantime, Karine’s previous work experience as an anti-violence and children’s rights campaigner reveals itself in some of the bleakest material on the album. Sex trafficking provides the premise for the deceptively jaunty trucking song “Maybe There’s A Road” whilst the disconcerting lullaby “Baleerie” commemorates Scots missionary Jane Haining, who lost her life in Auschwitz along with many of the children from the Jewish orphanage she ran in 1930s Budapest. These are tricky subject matters, of course, but Karine avoids mawkishness and conveys instead the quiet dignity and determination of the people at the heart of her songs.

But this is by no means a gloomy or worthily self-righteous album. The lullaby theme recurs rather more hopefully in the bell-like hypnotic “Holy Moses” with its gentle invocation to question what’s given and swim upstream if you have to, a consistent philosophical outlook echoed in the driving “Where the Smoke Blows” and it’s triumph over “the men with enormous heads and tiny hearts”.

There’s sheer joy in the lazy and infectiously sing-along “I’m Gonna Do It All” with its promise to “spread celestial light around” and in Karine’s ode to moving slowly through the world in “Let It All Hang Out”. The wistful sky gazing of “Don’t Know Why” compliments the wide-eyed wonderment at the universe of “Terminal Star”. And the far northern spirit of the delicate “Follow the Heron” brings the album to a close with a sense of contemplative delight.