Swinging Down That Lonesome Road

No, this is not another full-length Rhiannon Giddens album, just four months short of a year after the release of the much-praised, T Bone Burnett-produced Tomorrow Is My Turn. It’s nearly as good, though: more of the same.

Factory Girl, a five-cut EP, devotes itself to what didn’t make it to Tomorrow. That’s not because these were flawed performances or second-rate tracks. As it turned out, the sessions harvested an embarrassment of riches, and an insufficiency of space on the album to encompass otherwise deserving material. Factory Girl‘s quality flows on from the original as surely as if it had been part of it all along. Think of it as Tomorrow, cuts 12-16.

The set commences with the swinging “That Lonesome Road,” a 1927 popular song credited to Gene Austin and Nathaniel Shilkret (who in fact adapted it from the folksong “Look Up, Look Down That Lonesome Road”). It has previously been recorded by, among others, Sister Rosetta Tharp and Frank Sinatra. Also in that vein, is the penultimate number, Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s “Underneath the Harlem Moon” from 1932, here with a lyrically expanded treatment, underscoring Giddens’s assured way with a jazz-tinged song.

Two other numbers do the same for Scottish and Irish folk material, particularly strikingly in the tricky performance of the archaic “Didlbox,” a mouth-music piece. (Mouth music consists of vocal sounds usually intended to be danced to without instrumental accompaniment.) In “Factory Girl” Giddens, with Burnett and Lalenja Harrington, rewrites the 19th-century ballad in a stirring neo-Irish trad arrangement and moves it to a real-life modern-day tragedy: a deadly industrial fire in Bangladesh.

A Giddens original, “Moonshiner’s Daughter,” courses along on a ferocious folk-rock arrangement in a Fairport Convention vein.

In short, Factory Girl ought to hold you till the next full-length Rhiannon Giddens album arrives.