28 August 2009
Fly Global MusicWyl Menmuir
Referencing Star Wars and Star Trek in an opening song is surely not a wise move?
But then again there are several elements of Gwyneth Herbert's All The Ghosts that really shouldn't work, but somehow do, pulling together to form a varied and fascinating album.
It's perhaps the first time R2D2 has taken the place of a guitar solo (I'm prepared to be proved wrong on that and await a raft of comments about how the R2D2 sound has been referenced on several seminal albums don't you know) on the same opener, so points for originality to Ms Herbert there. If it wasn't all delivered by the slightly laconic Herbert it would run the risk of being unimpressive and gimmicky, but there's an air of distain, of worldliness uncommon in a 27-year-old, that makes it amusing rather than annoying.
It's a long way from the opening track to the out and out Americana of ‘My Mini and Me' or the singer-songwritery ‘Annie's Yellow Bag', which is catchy and poppy, yet fresh enough not to be saccharine and again, treads the right side of annoying to come across refreshing and novel.
While it's on the whole a jazzy affair there's a touch of the Eliza Carthy in the folky vocals and autobiographical lyrics, as well as Janis Joplin in the slightly hoarse ‘Jane into a Beauty Queen'.
It's easy to see where Herbert could have gone do terribly terribly wrong when she was offered the chance to be the next Norah Jones, but she took the brave move, dumped Universal for artistic differences and set out on her own path. There's a nod to that other path in the album's closing track ‘Some Days I Forget', which has a sickly sentimentality which could have ridden out several terrible albums for an artist on a major, given the right promotion, and while it has its place on the album it's shuddering to think it could be the basis for a whole career. As if to make up for it there's a blistering Bowie cover hidden a few minutes further on, which redresses the balance rather smartly.