Thea Gilmore - Avalanche

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Genius at work

There's perhaps little point in reviewing this album now – I'm twelve years late, after all – but I've been listening to it a lot recently and thought it worth saying what a superb piece of work it is.

The Gilmore is a superb songwriter and performer; it remains a mystery to me that she is still relatively little known.  The material here is absolutely top class, I think.  Gilmore's lyrics are intelligent, allusive and incredibly evocative, and she's musically magnificent.  Songs like Have You Heard or Razor Valentine have the same extraordinary quality you find in Leonard Cohen's best work and she can write a beautiful ballad in God Knows or a singable hit in Juliet.  She also comes up with songs which are uniquely brilliant and which I don't think could have been written by anyone else. 

I once read this about the great physicist Richard Feynmann, written by another distinguished physicist: “With the work of most great physicists you think that if only I was ten times cleverer and worked solidly for years and years I might have come up with that.  And then there are the magicians – and you know that however much cleverer you were and however long you worked at it, you could never manage what they did.  Feynmann was a magician.”  Sometimes Thea Gilmore is a magician in the same way, as in the title track here, which is utterly original and quite spellbinding in its imagery, its music and its arrangement. Take this:

"There's a rumour
Dirty as a chimneystack
Quiet as roadkill
On the northbound carriageway"

Stunning.  And then the meat of the message:

"Well, they sold you back your outrage
In a neat little shrink wrap and a beautiful face

And you think you've found your purpose
Well, they've been trailing the breadcrumbs
Of a water-tight case
So you're shouting, you're shouting softly
So no one can hear you and get the wrong idea"

I don't know of any song anywhere which better excoriates the way in which youthful rebellion is packaged, sanitised and marketed.  There is genius at work here – and I don't use the word lightly.

I won't go on any further.  This is a masterpiece – which you'll already know if you know Thea Gilmore's work.  If you don't, then don't hesitate. You won't regret buying this.