Reviews

Artist: Beck Goldsmith
Album:Purely Second Guesses
Label:Elk Road
Tracks: 10
Rating: ****
Contact:   http://www.beckgoldsmith.co.uk/

There's an old adage about not judging books by their covers. The same is equally true about cd booklets. As the cd draw closed and the music player fired up, I was expecting to hear a woman, her guitar and a song about some sort of introspection. It was definitely a chase the cliche sort of day.
Imagine my surprise when I got a girl, her guitar, piano, violin, mandolin, band and songs that reached out to engage me rather than try to pull me in. This was not a singer songwriter looking for tea and sympathy, this was a singer songwriter that knew there could be so much more to her music that a few simple chords.
It was time to dive deeper into both the cd and the booklet and find out a little more about Beck Goldsmith. The sleeve notes show this to be a people album, something that's reflected in the songs. There's a host of personalities and feelings that emerge from Beck's material. In someways it is an insular album. A lot of it comes from experience, but by adding the band around it you get the feeling that you're part of it rather than a voyeur on the outside looking in.
There are simpler songs on the album. Sometimes a song only needs an instrument of two. It's a sin to try and do too much with a track. It's possible to guild the lily too much, but then it's equally a sin to give a song too little. Fortunately Beck does neither.
I like someone that credits people with making the tea on the sleeve notes. Ok the person involved, Chris Wetton helped record, mix, master the album as well as photograph and design the thing. He managed to find time to make the tea, good on him.
You get the impression that when Beck writes, she writes songs. By that I mean. There are songwriters that set lyrics to music. They see the words and add the sounds. Beck gives the impression of doing it whole so that it's never just the sum of it's parts. "Didn't You Say" is one of the more stripped back songs on the album. The instrumentation is sparse but the song sounds complete.
Purely Second Guesses is an album that rewards the listener. It can take repeated plays in a short space of time. It's an album that works from start to finish as well as dipping into for a track or two.
It's not just an album that works, it's also an album that shows promise

Not long after listening to the album, we got in touch with Beck and invited her to be one of the first artists to be include in our new feature, Talking To...