Rating: 5/5
Review:
Let's raise a toast to ragged ghosts...
Even in an age when we are extraordinarily blessed with a lot of extremely good female singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic, Thea Gilmore is one of the very best there is. She's a great performer with a wonderful voice and the ability really to put a song over, and she writes songs of real musical depth and lyrics which are intelligent, literate, often witty, often spiky and sometimes genuinely beautiful. This is an album which shows all that: it collects a lot of great songs from her 13 albums to date, together with some new material and reworked tracks with a starry line up of guests.
There is a fine selection of great material here. It's a collection which shows the excellence and variety of her songwriting with singable hits like You're The Radio and London, the polemics like My Voice, the powerful Don't Mess songs like This Girl Is Taking Bets and the exceptionally beautiful love songs like Holding Your Hand. And then there are the quite unique, almost unclassifiable strokes of utter brilliance like Avalanche and Icarus Wind (which is on the vinyl and mp3 editions). Every one of them is listenable and musically intelligent, and every one has thoughtful, witty lyrics which are remarkable for their originality and brilliant use of metaphors and images.
I find the collaborations here a bit mixed, to be honest. The duets with Joan As Policewoman, Joan Baez and Billy Bragg are excellent, as are the tracks featuring John Cooper Clarke and Kid Creosote. Those with the Waterboys and John Bramwell work less well for me, but others may disagree. Overall, though, it's a superb collection - and an excellent place to start if you want to get to know Gilmore's work.
Thea Gilmore is something of a phenomenon, I think, and deserves to be far, far more widely known. I hope this album with its starry guest list will help to gain her the wider recognition she richly deserves. Very warmly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment