Music review: James Yorkston, Summerhall, Edinburgh
James Yorkston, Summerhall, Edinburgh ****
The delicacy of Yorkston’s live arrangement matches that of his understated but emotionally overflowing recordings. He plays guitar and sings, alongside double bassist Jack Thorne and multi-instrumentalist Neill MacColl, and together create a bed of lightly-strummed bass and tremulous, reverberating guitar which creates a rich, transporting context for Yorkston’s warm singing voice, with the occasional diversion into, for example, twanging steel guitar country on Tortoise Regrets Hare or brisk guitar picking on Red Fox.
In Yorkston’s delicacy there’s great power; in the love-fatigued cynicism of Tender to the Blues and the epic Perthshire travelogue of When the Haar Rolls In; in the thunderous invocation of depression and death on Broken Wave andin the sparse finale of his cover of Erasure’s A Little Respect.
“That was okay, but do you think it was…Jools Holland okay?” he asked, tongue in cheek, the weight of songwriting power on display mocking the need for the telly’s approval.
DAVID POLLOCK