Songs Lost & Stolen – SpiralEarth.com review
Some albums fly through the letterbox and hit you straight between the eyes. Others nonchalantly creep up behind to give you a sly nuzzle. This did neither of those things. In fact, I even started off disliking it, wondering where the fabulous singer who’d made Night Visiting and In The Shadow Of Mountains had gone. A few weeks on and I find myself wandering around the house in the middle of the night humming the subtly infectious melodies and grappling with the intriguing imagery of Bella Hardy’s lyrics. Its charms are not instant but they’re pretty potent.
Produced by Canadian Mattie Foulds of The Burns Unit – Mr Karine Polwart, if you prefer – it takes a vastly different approach to Hardy’s first two albums, not least because it is entirely self-written. A couple of the tracks, like Flowers Of May and The Herring Girl (including some lovely concertina from Chris Sherburn), follow the traditional format of Three Black Feathers, which made such a big impact on Night Visiting, and works beautifully. Elsewhere, though, she plunges into the unknown with a songwriting style that embraces pop sensibility, challenging lyrics and some complex structures, hence my initial dismay. Yet the more you grow into it the more you realise what an exceptional artist she is becoming…the daring rockabilly rhythms of Written In Green, the intriguing narrative and urgent snare drums of Jenny Wren, the gruesome Bridge Of Dean, the dark ‘Beauty & The Beast’ inspired fairy tale Rosabel that pitches her firmly in Emily Portman territory; and the plaintive bleakness of Broken Mirror. The tradition, clearly, is a very real and powerful influence that characterises the whole album, but she takes it to an enlightened place where the mix of styles eye each other uncertainly before discovering they have plenty in common and start having a grand old time.
Most involving of all is opening track Labyrinth. Apparently inspired in part by the singer Little Boots, it enters spookily to an ethereal backdrop of musical saw and very gently gathers pace, building into something of an epic of chunky fiddles, oblique metaphors and increasingly impassioned vocals. Occasionally a couple of the tracks border on the overly sentimental – I’m starting to fast-forward Full Moon Over Amsterdam – but remembering how Jim Moray helped to make Three Black Feathers famous, it’s easy to imagine many of the songs here being covered in a variety of different guises. Fay Hield doing Broken Mirror? Bellowhead covering The Herring Girl? Mumford & Sons having a crack at Labyrinth?
Doubt that any of them would match up to the originals, though, not with Kris Drever’s gorgeous slide guitar on Walk It With You, the wonderful harp of Corrina Hewat cropping up from time to time, the versatile guitar of Anna Massie drifting in and out of the action and the driving fiddle of Patsy Reid lighting up the album whenever she picks up her bow.
So yeah, first impressions can be misleading. This is a keeper.
