10 August 2009
Vortex Jazz

With the release of this, her second (self-written) album, singer Gwyneth Herbert's refusal to toe the Universal line (the company wanted her to make what she refers to as a 'TV chocolate-box kind of record' of big-band covers) is again shown to have been a thoroughly wise move - artistically, at any rate.

Building on the success of her previous release, Between Me and the Wardrobe (Blue Note), All the Ghosts showcases a considerable songwriting talent, original (even quirky), touching, confessional without descending into mawkishness, perceptive and literate.

Whether she's singing about sirens, drunks, sex workers or favourite old cars, Herbert's powerful but affecting voice is imbued with sincerity, sympathy and intelligence; the songs' melodies are at once immediately arresting and accessible (she claims that her piano playing is so basic that she 'can't do lots of flowery stuff', and consequently eschews complexity), and their arrangements (played by guitarist Al Cherry, pianist Steve Holness, bassist Sam Burgess and percussionist Dave Price) lean but striking, so the overall impression left by this intensely likeable, pleasingly idiosyncratic album is of having been given a personal snapshot of contemporary London life.

Herbert's current commission - to write a musical about the deviser of the city's A-Z, Phyllis Pearson (a woman, by all accounts, as feisty and self-motivated as Herbert herself), could not have gone to a more suitable writer.