Olivia Chaney - The Longest River

Rating:5/5

Review:
An outstanding album

This is an excellent album. Even in an era when we are blessed with a lot of very, very fine female singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic, I think this is quite outstanding.

Olivia Chaney has a lovely voice and uses it extremely well. She is also a very fine instrumentalist and her guitar and piano work especially really shine on this album, but it is her songwriting which makes this really special. It is original, intelligent and genuinely profound in places - for a first album especially, it is remarkable in its maturity and individuality. There is a melodic and harmonic freshness to the music, which can sound almost improvised at times, but also passages of finely crafted melody and harmony. Parts of Holiday, for example, are simply lovely and there are plenty of equally beautiful passages.

The arrangements and production are excellent. The album opens with False Bride, the Scottish traditional song often called I Loved A Lass. It has been recorded and sung many, many times but Olivia Chaney brings something fresh to it with a lovely, musically intelligent guitar accompaniment which preserves the sense and dignity of the song while setting it off beautifully. It's exemplary work, I think, and she brings the same quality of thought and insight to everything on the disc. The production is restrained and very well judged and the sound quality is excellent, so the whole thing really shines.

Lyrically, these are songs with something important to say, often personally revelatory and expressed in striking and evocative language. She's happy to have quite lengthy passages without rhymes in the excellent Imperfections, for example. You need to be a really good songwriter to pull that off successfully, but she does so magnificently; it's a tremendously affecting, involving song, and the same could be said of plenty of others.

Olivia Chaney has been called "the English Joni Mitchell," and there are definite echoes of Joni Mitchell in the melodic freedom and the lyrical originality and craftsmanship on this album. Chaney even nods in Mitchell's direction, singing of "my Chelsea morning" in Imperfections. Joni Mitchell, of course, is one of the very greatest singer-songwriters of the last 50 years while this is Chaney's first full album, so I don't think we should get ahead of ourselves with comparisons, but there's no doubt that Olivia Chaney is a rare talent. This is an album of real quality and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.