Rating: 5/5
Review:
An outstanding album
I think Little Beast is an outstanding album. I liked There’s A
Last Time For Everything very much, but after a five-year wait, this
is even better.
Little Beast is an
intimate, often self-revelatory album. It is permeated throughout
with heartache, but the combination of excellent songs, thoughtful,
intelligent lyrics and fine musicianship means that there is an
atmosphere of quiet, austere loveliness and it never becomes turgid
or depressing. Her songs deal with all kinds of emotional troubles
from the break-up of a loving relationship in Quit With Me to a
troubled relationship with drugs in the extraordinary Heroin, which
contains the lyrics:
Some things that I
want to say
Aren’t survivable,
or advisable
Like “Happy
birthday, heroin,”
But God, how I loved
you
And how I still do.
That stopped me in
my tracks on first hearing and the album is full of such pieces of
first-class writing. As well as such superbly expressed honesty, it
seems to me that Lucy Wainwright Roche has something of Leonard
Cohen’s gift for writing sometimes allusive, obscure lyrics which
somehow get right to the heart of things. She has a fine, haunting
voice and the production is brilliant, I think. It is often minimal
but has a terrific feel for the music so that each song is set off to
it’s very best.
Lucy Wainwright
Roche has been rather overshadowed by her two more flamboyant
siblings, but she’s a very fine singer-songwriter who deserves to
be much better known. Little Beast is a bit of genuine class and is
one of my favourite albums so far this year. Very, very warmly
recommended.
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