Chuck Lipsig wrote this review.
Imagine, if you will, a singer, backed by guitar, bass and other instruments, performing something between blues, quiet jazz, and folk. Maybe it’s a smoky bar or a coffee house – any place where music is played for a small crowd. Now, imagine that place is in Scotland, just outside Glasgow. I don’t really know if Andy Shanks and Jim Russell’s Diamonds in the Night is performed in that type of setting (except it was recorded near Glasgow), but it feels like that type of music – close, intimate, and personal. Andy Shanks is the singer of this duo and also plays guitar. Jim Russell plays guitar, as well as whistles, melodeon, and concertina. With one exception, they wrote all the songs on the CD.
When I catch myself singing or whistling a song during the day and it doesn’t bother me that it’s stuck in my head. That’s a decent sign that it’s a good song. For the past week or so, I’ve been catching myself humming the title song, “Diamonds in the Night.” This quiet song opens with the odd combination of melodeon and double bass on the intro. The lyrics concern the wisdom of the old that the young overlook. But the chorus (“Diamonds, diamonds in the night/ We all need dreams, I’m no exception.”) is strikingly hopeful and applies to a lot of life.
Other strong songs include “St. Andrew in the Window,” a lament for the victims of violence. This starts off as a solid, quiet little song and makes a transformation to an odd instrumental at the end. “Compass Heart” is a wonderful upbeat seagoing ballad about the captain of the Cutty Sark, with music that perfectly evokes a fast ocean voyage.
On the jazzier end of the music, “Ash Pirates” is a haunting account of the walks that authors Robert Louis Stevenson and S. R. Crockett took, inspiring many of their stories. The juxtaposition of a soft jazz with a much older story works surprisingly well with Lindsay Cooper’s double bass wonderfully mood-setting. “Street Dances” and “Midnight City Buses” are a pair of gentle songs of the urban night life that feature good tenor sax solos by John Burgess.
While some of the songs are nothing more than vaguely pleasant, the only one that didn’t work at all for me was “Mogadishu.” The lyrics of this song about the horrors of war just don’t match the lush musical arrangement. If they had stripped down the arrangement, it would have likely been a much better musical fit.
All and all, Diamonds in the Night is a nice, solid CD with tracks ranging from very good to indifferent. It’s not something I’d recommend going out of one’s way to track down, but there are far worse ways to spend 45 minutes.
(Culburnie, 1997)
