28 August 2009
The Guardian
John Fordham


Gwyneth Herbert didn't hang a jazz-singer label around her neck when she made her memorable debut in 2004, but she featured some sensitive interpretations of jazz standards, despite her clearly very non-sectarian tastes. This fine album, which marks Herbert's second restart after brief flings with major labels (first Universal, then Blue Note), is also the truest to her distinctive muse, with its debts to Janis Ian, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits, as much as to Billie Holiday or Nina Simone. These originals represent Herbert's own world: caught on the bus back to Hackney full of battered late-night voyagers, in the Ray Davies bounce of Annie's Yellow Bag, or drifting past the eerie metallic crashes on Lorelei ("What's the matter, Kafka got your tongue?"). Herbert's earlier jazz following perhaps won't find many familiar landmarks (though her ironic London road song sounds as if it has borrowed Cassandra Wilson's blues band), but as an idiosyncratic singer-songwriter album, All the Ghosts will be on the year-end hitlists whatever its genre.