Natalie Merchant was in Ireland and Scotland last week to introduce songs from her forthcoming Nonesuch debut, Leave Your Sleep, to audiences in Dublin and Glasgow. To coincide with Natalie's Glasgow Royal Concert Hall performance for the Celtic Connections festival, the BBC posted video footage from the live BBC Radio Scotland set she did, performing four songs off what the BBC calls "her ambitious new album." You can watch it now at bbc.co.uk.

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The Scotsman gives four stars to Natalie's Celtic Connections performance last Thursday night. It was an event "met with fervent anticipation by a capacity crowd," says the paper's Sue Wilson, "and the New York singer-songwriter certainly didn't disappoint."

The set, which featured songs from throughout Natalie's solo career, including the forthcoming album, "gave full rein to the mercurial potency of her throaty, treacle-dark voice," says Wilson, "with its endlessly subtle dynamic play between fragile and fierce, febrile and mordant, forlorn and seductive."

Read the concert review at news.scotsman.com.

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Reviewer Joe Breen of the Irish Times says that through her set at Whelan's in Dublin last Monday, Merchant remained "the apple of everyone’s eye—and rightly so." Breen describes Merchant's instrument as "one of the great signature voices of rock, folk or whatever genre she applies it to. It can be warm and comforting, empathetic and intelligent, or strident and defiant, and sometimes all of that and more."

While other artists' efforts to set poetry to music have not always  produced perfect results, Breen says that, given what he heard in the live set, there's reason to hope for more here, as "the simple beauty of her adaptation of the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ee cummings and Robert Graves augurs well for the album."

Read the concert review at irishtimes.com.

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There is a feature profile of Merchant in Chronogram, the arts and culture magazine of her Hudson Valley home, that follows her career from the early days with 10,000 Maniacs up through Leave Your Sleep.

"Musically it plays like a voyage around the world," says Chronogram's Peter Aaron of the upcoming album, "stopping at exotic ports to take in everything from blues to sea chanteys, Dixieland to Celtic folk, reggae to bluegrass, rock to chamber and early music, plus a boatload of other sounds."

Aaron goes on to marvel at Merchant's matching of music to the feel demanding by its lyric source, no easy feat. The album's "genius is in how Merchant pairs the poems with just the right accompaniment," he says. "Merchant somehow visits the brains of her de facto lyricists, most of whom are long dead, and gets them to tell her exactly what they’d like to hear."

Read the complete article at chronogram.com.