Rating: 4/5
Review:
Good, but not great
I like this album, but I can't get quite as excited about it
as some other reviewers. I love Lucy
Wainwright Roche's work and I was looking forward to this collaboration with
Martha very much. It's good, but not
quite as special as I had hoped.
The performances are great.
Both sisters sing beautifully and the combination of Lucy's pure soprano
and Martha's slightly breathier, darker-toned voice is simply lovely throughout
the album. There are some very nice
harmonies and the minimal backing suits the atmosphere very well, so the
overall sound of the album is really nice.
My reservations lie in the material, and a slight sameness
of sound throughout. There's a very
similar feel to many of these songs – five tracks have a title containing the
word lullaby and several others are cradle songs of one sort or another. There is variety in the tone of the lyrics,
but I could have done with a bit more variation in musical tone to go with it, even
if there is that overall theme. Even
Long Lankin, the traditional bloodthirsty murder ballad, sounds rather gentle
and lovely; it's beautifully performed, but I'm not sure the setting is right
for the content. End Of The Rainbow is
one of Richard Thompson's bleakest, most pessimistic songs (which means it's
*really* bleak and pessimistic) and perhaps some of its impact is lost because
of the very beautiful treatment it gets here.
I know it seems perverse to complain about how beautiful
everything sounds; it's just that although individually each song is very lovely,
after a few tracks I really do begin to yearn for a little variation and as an
entire album I think this doesn’t quite get it right.
Don't let me put you off.
Plenty of people love the whole thing and it's certainly a very classy
piece of performance and production. I'd
suggest you try it and judge for yourself, but as a whole album I didn't find
this quite as great as I had hoped.
No comments:
Post a Comment