Rachel Sermanni is one of those sirens that those captaining ships need to be on the lookout for. She's one that you'd need to avoid because you would undoubtedly take that wheel and guide your boat right into the rocks, trying to get to her, singing there on the rocks. She can lure you in that easily and she grabs hold.
The songwriter from Carrbridge brings you close with a come hither-ness that's demure and alluring. It's got a little of all the subtle spices in it. Before too long, you look down and realize that you've been lured into a hole and it's being filled in with loose dirt. You can't move and you're at the mercy of the beauty with the shovel and what could amount to be the last word. It's then that you make eye contact and the spell takes real hold. She sings to you that she remembers waltzing with you in her dreams and you seem to recall - or she can convince you of the memory and the way that she felt at the ends of your arms, moving across the floor like that, so graceful and quiet, just the bottoms of your shoes sliding against it to the strains of the tender music. You recall wanting the night to never end and yet it ended like all the rest, leaving you with a hollowness that's suddenly getting filled back up with this new encounter.
Sermanni's songs straddle a line between these mysterious feelings of closeness and the belief -- on the other hand -- that they never happened, nor could they have ever happened. Perhaps, that's the role of the siren - the lure, without an actual line, without a speaking part, just that temping hum and coo through the distance. She sings, "We'll swim knowing they can't touch us," so we follow, wanting the same thing she wants. She can lead us to those deep, dark waters, farther and farther from the coast, closer and closer to oblivion.