5/5
Review:
Another very good album from Amy LaVere
This is a very good album from Amy LaVere. It has taken a while for it to really grow on me, but I think it's a worthy successor to the excellent Runaway's Diary.
Amy LaVere writes fine songs in a variety of styles. This is another eclectic collection, still distinctively LaVere. Her music often seems laid-back and can have a lovely, infectious swing to it, but there's real musical content and depth there. She has a distinctive sound with her upright bass playing and fine, slightly breathy and deceptively girlie-sounding voice. What she sings with it is anything but fluffy and girlie, though; she writes fine, often quirky lyrics which are always intelligent and sometimes really penetrating. The opener is a charming, almost nursery-rhyme-like piece from the point of view of a cricket circling a lamp at night, for example, but is also a metaphor for the realisation of human potential. The title track is another celebration of human diversity and individualism, musically reminiscent of Save The Last Dance For Me; The Last Rock And Roll Boy To Dance is a fabulously swung, bluesy-feeling delight in dancing, and so on...and then you suddenly realise you're listening to Red Banks, a clever and haunting a song about the victim of a violent, abusive, even murderous relationship.
And that's what you get with Amy LaVere - fine, distinctive and diverse songs which somehow come together to form a cohesive album. It's all very well played and performed, with generally restrained production which suits these songs excellently. At a time when there are a lot of very, very fine female singer-songwriters producing excellent work on both sides of the Atlantic, Amy LaVere stands proudly among them, I think. She deserves to be far better known, and I can recommend this (and her last one, Runaway's Diary) very warmly indeed.
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