Lucy Farrell, Catherine MacLellan, The Green Note review - sublime frequencies

Lucy Farrell, one quarter of the brilliant, award-winning Anglo-Scots band Furrow Collective, and a solo artist whose stunning debut album, We Are Only Sound, was released in 2023, divides her time between the UK – she’s a native of Kent – and Prince Edward Island, a musically rich parcel of land off Canada’s eastern seaboard. The island is home to the other half of this sublime folk-acoustic double bill, Juno Award-winning songwriter Catherine MacLellan.

They’re playing small venues across the UK till the end of the merrie month of May – the Blaxhall Sessions in Suffolk and the Hungate Church in Beccles are coming up this weekend, with the likes of the Square and Compass on the Isle of Purbeck and Knoydart in the Scottish Highlights already behind them. Farrell, we’re told, is doing the driving.

We Are Only Sound and MacLellan’s most recent, 2020’s Coyote, are among the song sources for their sets, which err towards the sublime and the spellbinding, but you get the impression that each night the choice of what they play is up for grabs, and ranges wide, but always stays deep in the pocket instrumentally, vocally and in how they frame their songs with stories and asides that bring them closer and into deeper focus.

For example, I didn’t originally get the Selkie origins of the beautiful ballad “But For You” from We Are Only Sound. Here, Farrell introduces it by telling the folkloric story of the Selkie wife having to choose between her human family or returning to where she came from after her children discover her old ‘seal’ skin. That folkloric setting casts a deeper, more saturated chiaroscuro across this song of deep yearning, connection and identity. In performance, it is almost painfully beautiful and affecting.

The night opens with Farrell’s self-revealing relationship song “Never Enough”, while MacLellan joins her for affecting vocal harmonies on “Cabin for Winter”, a new song reflecting on Farrell’s new life on Prince Edward Island. MacLellan’s set begins with “Snowbird”, one of her father’s songs, with Farrell switching from tenor guitar to viola, and extends into a tender, aching “Come Back In”, which she describes as a “trying to not break up song”.

Their performances are quiet, focused, intense. That level of focus does not drop away. You could hear a pin drop. Farrell’s “Agnes” and MacLellan’s “Can We Start from Here” are both brand new, and feature on From Memory, an excellent new EP the duo are selling at their gigs – and nowhere else (it’s not on line or on any streaming platform). You have a couple of weeks before their UK tour comes to a close, so take the opportunity to pick up a copy at any of their 10 remaining performances. You won’t regret it.

• Tim Cumming's website
• More new music reviews on theartsdesk