Sunday, 14 October 2018

Lucy Wainwright Roche - Little Beast


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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