Preview

Every now and again, if you open up our mind just a little and give something a chance or three, you can end up stumbling over something beautiful you may have otherwise missed. So it was with Canadian singer-songwriter Oh Susanna at the last Easter Festival. The eighty or so crowd at the Talbot that night was dead silent, taking in her amazingly powerful voice and delicate guitar picking with awe. It was simply mesmerising.

She embodies ghostly voices wailing to be heard from the other side - voices of tormented souls stumbling through Civil War swamps, fighting in Indian rebellions, lamenting the loss of love and hoping for a better world to come. That is the landscape that singer-songwriter Oh Susanna (aka Suzie Ungerleider) can conjure at the drop of a lyric and the pluck of a doomed chord.

This time she returns with her full Canadian band and a new, eponymously titled CD. Not to be missed.

‘Every now and then there is a voice that you hear that is genuinely affecting. Neil Young is one of those voices. It has an emotive quality to it. It's the same with Oh Susanna. She pulls the heartstrings.’ - Bob Harris BBC

Review

The Spring 2003 run of gigs has been one of our strongest line-ups so far, we reckon, and it climaxed with part two of our short Canadian season in the form of this engrossing double-header bill, which attracted a substantial and attentively appreciative crowd.

After Oh Susanna's unforgettably riveting solo show at last year's Festival, an essay in the 'less-is-more' phenomenon, we'd been musing on whether a backing band would complement her dark-night-of-the-soul songs, or reduce their impact ... We needn't have worried. Her fine new eponymously-titled CD reveals Suzie as something of a closet rocker: on songs like 'Carrie Lee', 'Right By Your Side', and 'Mama', she really gives it some wellie as the band adopts an agreeably loose mid-tempo groove that's as much early-70s Stones or Crazy Horse as it is current Americana, but when it comes to essaying her patented moments of stillness on songs like 'The One' and 'Unknown Land', the guys know when not to play. This was the first night of her current UK tour on which the lead guitarist was unavailable (a solo gig in London deprived us of him), but in his absence Cam Giroux on drums was tasteful but never flashy, Bazil Donovan (of cult Canadian rockers Blue Rodeo), an endearingly shambling, tour-rumpled figure, played consistently lyrical bass on an instrument that looked as though it had been left out in the rain for a year or two, and the rakish but enigmatic Bob Packwood really shone on piano, displaying not only energy aplenty but also what we ivory-ticklers enviously refer to as a fluid right hand (That's enough of that. - Ed.). From Suzie's previous CD, 'Sleepy Little Sailor', we got the unforgettable 'River Blue' and Otis Redding's 'Dreams to Remember', while her rebuild job on Dylan's 'I'll Keep It With Mine' was extremely striking. Encores came in the form of 'Zoe', a touching childhood vignette, and 'Down By The Quarry' (with Stephen Fearing on second guitar), a deceptively homely-sounding gospelly backwoods song that's actually concerned with al fresco lovemaking. After two visits to Tregaron, Suzie's built up a strong fan base in these parts, and it's richly deserved. A trio of brazenly selfish smokers aside, this was altogether a fabulous gig.