The Merciful Road

This follow-up to 2018’s The Fell finds the Northumberland duo tramping through familiar musical ground as they once more meditate on the natural world and its consolations in their native Tweed Valley on the Scottish Borders. The air is melancholy, but ultimately, as the title suggests, merciful.

Seven self-written songs are accompanied by an arrangement of the traditional Borders parting song, ‘When Fortune Turns the Wheel’. The brothers bring a host of delicately plucked strings, from fretless gourd banjo and bouzouki, guitar and fiddle, alongside flute and percussion. Guests include Celtic harpist Siannie Moodie (who also appeared on The Fell), Jen Hill on double bass and Mairead Kerr on piano. There is a soft and caressing atmosphere of Romantic poetic whimsy to The Brothers Gillespie. They conjure an almost Victorian Gothic air of craggy moorland and drystone wall, with something of the Nick Drake guitar and voice intimacy in their delivery. Their muse often appears to be the land itself – both the idea of it and its physicality – such as on the self-described love song ‘Albion’ and ‘Great Aunt Katherine’, telling the tale of migration to New Zealand during the clearances, and the loss of home.