Jim Moray - The Outlander (2019) [Hi-Res]

The Outlander is award winning folk singer, guitarist and producer Jim Moray's seventh solo album, and the first since the widely acclaimed Upcetera.

The Outlander consists of ten traditional songs, some familiar and some rare and obscure. In contrast to Jim's previous ways of working it is a simpler, more direct, album based around live performances. 
The seeds of inspiration for the record can be traced to the purchase of a 1949 Epiphone Triumph archtop guitar that had lain untouched for forty years, bought from a Liverpool taxi driver. Realising that it was possible to play in the percussive English folk guitar style on an electric instrument, he invited violinist Sam Sweeney to join him in the studio to reinvent the familiar folk guitar/fiddle format. "I felt it was time to reset my baseline a bit and make something that was a straighter statement of traditional music. I wanted to see what would happen if I had someone else to bounce off, and maybe shape the arrangements in real time."



But, this being Jim Moray, 'simpler' doesn't mean lacking in depth. From the driving guitar and hurdy gurdy of album opener Lord Ellenwater (collected in Cambridgeshire in 1907) to the bowed guitars of The Bramble Briar, the sonic attention-to-detail which exemplified previous albums is instantly recognisable. Rejecting drums entirely, several songs, such as highwayman ballad Bold Lovell, rely on handclaps for the rhythm - something borrowed from Toureg band Tinariwen. The album's centrepiece, Child ballad Lord Gregory, is performed as a duet with Josienne Clarke as the epic scope of the story spreads out over six and half minutes.


The result is an album that has a clear lineage to the classic albums of the folk revival, reimagined by one of the best musical minds of his generation. The simplest, clearest Jim Moray album yet.