The Girl Who Couldn't Fly
A succession of plaudit-harvesting folk albums and subsequent international renown means that Yorkshire's Kate Rusby no longer needs to be nurtured with kind words of condescension along the lines of lass, babe, and starlet, and yet there remains something irredeemably youthful aboutThe Girl Who Couldn't Fly. It's not just the butterfly flutter of Rusby's voice--which allows the nudge and wink of a smutty traditional favourite like "Game of All Fours" to retain its charade and the magic of innocent years to linger. Sometimes the songs are bare--guitar and vocals--but they're never spartan, pink as nature intended, a curiously roseate melancholia where even an ill-fated adieu such as "No Names"--one of three songs sang, improbably, with Roddy Woomble of Idlewild--mollifies as fluently as a lullaby. The jolly virtues of the traditional "Mary Blaize" and Rusby's very own faux-traditional epic "Elfin Knight" are fleshier, finding Rusby accompanied by such folk scene luminati as Michael McGoldrick, Andy Cutting, and John McCusker to ebullient effect. Proof, indeed, that folk music need not be studiously dour or touristically picturesque. If the current British folk scene is to produce a genuine household name, it's likely to be Kate Rusby.--Kevin Maidment