The fresh-faced Georgia Fields stares out from the album cover to a point just over your left shoulder. The photo is bathed in warmth, a gentle pinkish tinge to the wall, the light throwing intriguing shapes across her face. To a certain extent, the cover is the perfect metaphor for her music: fresh and sprightly, warmly comforting, and delicately intriguing, her self-titled debut twists and turns with a delightful joie de vivre, a gentle wit and a dash of naïvety.
The album opens with a little light theatricality, a surprisingly grandiose, minor-key overture to the first track proper, "Seven Years", which subsequently picks up the melody. Abandoning strings in favour of a bubbly vibraphone line, the track flutters dynamically behind Fields' vocals, detailing her curious early years spent in a cult.
Fields tirelessly works the metaphor, and although her wordcraft occasionally borders on GCSE-level saccharine, enjoyment of the album often hinges on the complex interplay of images that she conjures within each of her miniature symphonies. "Blue Sky With A Black Cloud Parade", which opens with Fields' mournful brass arrangement, slips into a crisp anti-serenade of heartache and longing ("I wish that you had perforated edges/So I could tear you out of this"), whilst the bistro-pop of "Sinking Relation Ship" is a quirky, clarinet-powered three-step of failing intimacies and bittersweet lyricisms ("We're falling apart like Pavlova"). And on album closer, "Cold War", as the lopsided piano hobbles eerily across Fields' entreaties to her estranged, our heroine sighs - half yearning, half ironic - "And we sure knew how to put/the fun in dysfunctionality".
Not that it's all emotional turmoil. The flipside of the marital coin also receives the Fields treatment, a charming innocence underpinning the proceedings, even if, on songs such as "All The King's Men" (a ukulele-driven nursery rhyme, all domestic bliss, sheets like filo pastry, and sunny demeanours), she veers a little too close to twee with the line, "Put your kiss in a/Tupperware container/Take it home with me so that/I can taste it later". Indeed, much of her lyrical content is concerned with relationships, ranging from the early highs ("Something Borrowed, Something Blue"), and the idyllic ("All The King's Men") to the creaking ("Sinking Relations Ship"), the torn ("Blue Sky With A Black Sky Parade") and the resigned ("Chessboard").
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In many ways, Fields plays with her songs in the same way children play with a dolls house, as a medium to explore her dreams and ideas to their logical (or indeed nightmarish) conclusion. In "Two For Tea", this daydreaming boils over in a sickly froth of childlike fantasies - enough to send the nearest suitor running for the hills - as a bit of harmless GTA playing is exchanged very generously against the arrival of a sprog (nothing's ever free in this world, after all). Indeed, the occasional over-worked lyrical construction or cringe-inducing image is put into context by the pure pop sensibility of the only song not written by Fields, "Satellite". Penned by childhood friend and cellist Judith Hamann (who contributes in some way to almost all the tracks on the album), the heady "Satellite", still chock full of its own curious turns of phrase, displays a lightness of touch that sometimes goes missing on Fields' own musings.
Over fourteen tracks, there's no denying that the album is a little bloated. But it nevertheless remains, on the whole, charming and sweetly inventive (cf. the toy-box percussion on "Something Borrowed, Something Blue", the cordless drill on "Sinking Relation Ship" or the chanted refrain on "Cold War"), a pleasantly enchanting collection of wistful, ingenuous and spirited patchwork pop ditties.
Georgia Fields on MySpace
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