There is some wonderful high quality music coming out of Scotland at the moment, although Iona Leigh was born in Australia and currently lives in London, her heart is firmly at home in the Highlands. Beside The Waves Of Time is her second album and the singer and harp player has gathered a formidable array of musicians around her to realise her vision.

Recorded at at Nick Turner's Watercolour Studio on the Ardgour Peninsula with Jarlath Henderson (Uillean Pipes), Duncan Lyall (Upright Bass), Findlay Napier (Guitar), Mary Ann Kennedy (Harp), Paul Jennings (Drums) and Gillian Frame (Fiddle). Iona has a delicious voice that crosses the divide of folk and pop/rock, the songs are concerned with love and it's manifestations and ramifications. Much is made of Iona's childhood spent in the Findhorn community in northern Scotland and I did wonder whether this presaged something of a new age kind of spiritual album, my preconceptions were firmly blown out of the window upon my first listen.

the songwriting and arrangements have a celtic vein running through them all and avoid the trap of falling in to a twee self referential form of celticity. The album is actually a very contemporary piece, the references to nature and legend are there but Iona deals with them in universal terms of love and loss that are easily related to. The production is wonderful, allowing her voice or particular instruments exactly the space they deserve.

Beside The Waves Of Time gets every ounce of quality from the assembled musicians and touches many musical bases in it's course, from the pipe driven folk rock of Let Erin Remember to the calm contemplation of Trees it never ceases to be mature and varied. Perhaps the final track No More Tears, evocative lyrics with a sparse musical arrangement, is the most arrestingly beautiful and is the song that I have gone back to most on the album.

Thank you Spiral Earth