Mary Gauthier - Trouble & Love

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another excellent album from Mary Gauthier

This is another very fine album from the great Mary Gauthier. It's been four years since The Foundling and she has come up with another intensely personal album of excellent, autobiographical songs - this time telling the story of a relationship break-up, the consequent emotional damage and the beginnings of recovery.

As you'd expect, these are songs of real quality. They are beautifully crafted with straightforward, singable tunes which form great settings for the personal, emotionally powerful lyrics. Gauthier's admirers (like me) will know what to expect and won't be disappointed; she's doing what she does best here and doing it brilliantly. While perhaps not quite as raw as she was in The Foundling, this is nonetheless an album of pain seeking balm and redemption, which she expresses as few others can. How You Learn To Live Alone, for example is a profound and oddly beautiful evocation of the withdrawal from life which can follow intense emotional hurt and is an outstandingly honest and insightful song. That slightly fractured voice, her acoustic guitar and a brilliant group of musicians and singers bring all these songs to life wonderfully. The arrangement and production are pitch-perfect, making everything shine without ever swamping it.

I loved The Foundling even though it wasn't a commercial success. Trouble & Love is a bit more accessible, I think, but it shares a lot of what I loved about The Foundling - thoughtful, sincere and meaningful songs with good tunes and great performances. Here we have just eight songs and a total of about 40 minutes of music. No padding or superfluous material; Mary Gauthier has distilled what she wants to say into this eight-chapter story and it's just brilliant. It has the enduring beauty which comes from being built on noble bones, and I think I will be playing this for many years to come.

There have been excellent albums recently from two other greats of the genre with Eliza Gilkyson's Nocturne Diaries and Kris Delmhorst's Blood Test. If anything, I think this is my favourite of the three, which is really saying something. I recommend this very warmly to anyone who likes an intelligent, listenable song performed by a singer/songwriter who really knows what she's talking about and means what she says. It's truly excellent.