Reviews

Artist: Lisa Marie Glover
Album: Einzelkind
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website:http://www.lisamarieglover.co.uk

Maybe the best time to judge a band isn't when they are performing, but a good few years later when their influences are felt in the music of the bands and musicians that came after them. There's a lot of big names that fail this test and some surprising other names that succeed very well. Listening to "Einzelkind", you can hear the influences of Ruby Blue, particularly the phrasing of their lead singer, Rebecca Pidgeon.

The key word there is influence, if this was just a quasi-Ruby Blue album, it wouldn't be half the album I've spent weeks listening to, but not wanting to review as that would mean I'd have to move on and I'm not sure I'm ready to do that yet, it would have meant that the world would have moved on and the sound hadn't.

Lisa Marie Glover is a great songwriter, she has a vision that seems to look at the world through shattered glass, everything slightly just out of focus, off at a kilter, but what a beautiful world it is, light refracting and reflecting in so many different ways. The cracks leading you off in different directions and ending up somewhere that's absolutely right, but not where you expected up when you started your journey.

The shattered glass also puts darkness into unexpected places as darkness creeps in with almost gothic majesty. "Calculator" is a song that emphasises this more than most, there's something about dangerous eyes that is both alluring and more than a little bit dangerous and that tale is woven around the more obvious button pushing thoughts.

It's those tangents that fire up her songs and give them an edge that's difficult to find, almost to the point of being indefinable and yet they are trapped within some fantastic melodies, deceptively simple, but an absolute joy of an album to keep coming back to.

Neil King

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