Hilary Bell, Breaking All the Rules (Yarrow records, 2001)
On of the nice things about being a music reviewer, is the enormous range and different folk music from around the world you get to listen to. It would be easy to lie through your teeth and give each album a great review, but I am not a hypocrite and can only report what I think. Have you ever been to a folk club or a festival, when a lady gets up to sing, and she has a perfectly nice voice, sings absolutely in tune. Nobody is rude to her, applauds when she has finished, but secretly wish you had gone to the bar when she came on to sing. Well this I fear is the case with Hilary Bell. She simply has the wrong type of voice for folk music! She is too good.
Hillary Bell comes from the Yarrow Valley in the Scottish borders. Having studied music at Napier College, Edinburgh, and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, she is now teaching traditional singing at the Borders Traditional Music Centre. Bearing this in mind and the album having such folk music luminaries as John Wright: vocals, Stewart Hardy: violin, Ian Lowthian: accordion, and Kenny Speirs: guitar, I surprised by the path she chose to take with her repertoire.
The first bite is with the eye, or so they say. The CD cover has a nice photograph of a guitar over Neidpath Castle in the Scottish Borders, very Celtic looking! I thought this looks okay, and knowing the quality and standard of folk song that comes out of Scotland these days, I put the disc on and sat back in great expectation.
I am sorry but I took a dislike to this album from the minute I put it on. Hilary sings in an alto voice and to be fair she sings very well, if you like this sort of thing, what I think of as a Julie Andrews type of voice. It's fine for opera or Gilbert & Sullivan, but it simply does not work when giving music a folk music treatment. I managed to sit through the first 3 songs without to much pain, but when she launched in to Gershwin's 'Summertime' on the next track, I gave up and went outside to mow the lawn. Although each note is played and sung perfectly, overall I found the treatment of the songs very cold, clinical, and as a result lacking in feeling.
However I did manage to get to track 11 and found two nice songs: 'Somebody' (by Robert Burns) and 'Yarrow's Green Braes'. But two songs do not constitute an album worth having. This album certainly was not to my liking, mainly because I hate the Julie Andrews voice, but for all I know some of our readers might enjoy Hilary's voice and delivery. I recommend you listen to the album's content before purchasing.
As for the material, I am sorry Hilary but I think this was a mistake to go breaking all the rules, on your first solo album at least. As the saying goes, you can't judge a book by looking at its cover.
A website for Yarrow Records can be found here.
