Fanny Lumsden wears tartan on the cover of her fifth album, Traditions, and opens it with bagpipes. No prizes for guessing her ancestry. There’s even a Lumsden tartan, which her brother Tom often wears on stage.
The record asks how heritage shapes who you are, and Lumsden answers in close-up: heat haze, shadows falling on red gums, kids running amok with wet hair and food down their shirts.
By The River, with Paul Kelly, is the highlight. It’s a banjo-plucked ode to her river-rat family, full of blackberries, a black snake on the bank and the marks grass leaves on your knees. Every song here knows exactly where it’s standing, and this one most of all.
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Mother’s Eyes is the bravest. Lumsden describes her mum’s eyes – “deep-set, sloped down at the sides” – inside a song about the beauty standards women in music are expected to meet: “Always swore I was going to age with grace/And I bitched about the girls with filler in their face/But now I’m getting older, I don’t know/But my body made two babies and I’m glad it shows.”
Tom anchors her band, The Daddies (formerly The Prawn Stars). The siblings have sung together for as long as she can remember, and their blood harmonies are the Lumsden sound.
Difficult Woman closes the record on a celebration of the divine feminine: “We’re throwing streamers while they’re throwing knives.” Be more like Fanny.
Traditions is out 30 October via Red Dirt Records.
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