If you can’t get enough of ALISON KRAUSS, TORI AMOS, AIMEE MAN and similarly whey-voiced American dreamsters, LEAH MORGAN should fill a void.
Not that your saccharine-averse reviewer is going to join you in the queue.
This is a professionally polished album of bright clear music, featuring a pure voice, a half decent piano style and some occasional guitar. Expensive sounding musicians chip in with tasteful bits and bobs that are decorative rather than communicative. The album's US appearance dates back to 2003 as far as I can tell. Eire and the UK have had notice of it since the Spring of this year, without a lot of notice being taken.
The songs are indistinctly yearning and "deep" in a blank faced, soft focus, staring into the middle distance kind of consumerising way. As part of a growing trend towards songs that get progressively more intense about increasingly superficial subjects, this holds back a little. But don’t expect anything like gravitas. The nasal whine jars now and again, but her voce is mostly pure-toned and beguiling. For such an obviously musical person (the piano is fine) , her phrasing isn’t all you’d expect. But the current fashion for a one dimensional (don’t scare the MOR listeners) sound is adequately respected.
Lyrically I struggle to follow the microscopic blandness of what is being ventured. It sounds for all the world like the autobiographical meanderings of a precocious and affluent young woman whose benchmark for emotional truth is the denouement of a slightly weepy episode of Friends. Nothing happens. No one goes anywhere; much coffee is left to go cold. No poetic nuggets are offered. In fact, I was moved to severe discomfort by one chorus that, on checking US reactions on the interwebnetthing, seems to be regarded as a sign of her quality. From "Square Plate Song", we get a sub-JANIS IAN rush of well-made and flowing lines about someone called Arnie that hurtle three or four times up to the following tenderness:
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Arnie do you know why the river is green?
Why it’s safer to get sloshed in a throng?
But to be honest, Arnie, what’s bothering me
Is that I've never seen a plate that's not round"
Now if that isn’t maudlin tosh of the highest order (and clumsy with it), then I'm no judge of a lyric. But if it touches your heart, and you can cope with the near zero rhymes, then beat me with your scented pencil case and spend the last of your allowance on ordering the "Zero Dollars Spent" from CDBaby. You’re going to love it.
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