Reviews
Roberta Smith Album: Humdrum Five
Label: Indigo Songs
Tracks: 5
Website: https://www.robertasmithsongs.com/
A Leeds-born breathy-voiced boho fingerstyle singer-guitarist with roots in the singer-songwriter movement of the 70, her music mingles folk and jazz, evoking Vashti Bunyan and Pentangle with shades of Dave Brubeck rhythm to EP opener 'Humdrum', a quirky take on surviving repetitive office work featuring clapping and claves. Produced by the late Aeron Z .Jones who plays bass, it comprises three unreleased tracks that have been pumped up with violin, bass and rhythm guitar, plus two new recordings which provide the bookends, the other being 'Somebody Else's Child' an offbeat love song about desire ("You are the face that seems out of place in the crowd/They all see you silent but me; I see you aloud/I'm weakened at the knees") for the wrong sort of man ("why should you destroy just because you're born a boy; wicked and wild?/You're Women's-Lib-reviled") and a willingness to take a leap of faith ("Let's see if I can prove my misgivings wrong!/But why should you be rough?/There is gentleness enough in your fun").
There's jazzy vibes to on the nervy circling guitar pattern of' 'Five' that uses cosmic imagery ("Instead of carbon-based, I/Think I may be based on chrome./I'm interstellar waste") with its themes of alienation and disconnection ("I do not think I belong down here…Cos it's cold out here and the atmosphere is too thin and so's your skin…the predicament you're in/Is just no win") and the wry closing line "semi-detached suburban alien seeks kindred spirit".
"Affairs with secretaries behind Oxford dictionaries/Are supposed to be a given fact of life" she sings on .'The Secretary Song', a commentary on "the illusions of today" where "everything's permitted in the loving game/With nothing to be admitted but your lost good name" and the rule of thumb seems to be "you should have lots of sex/With your wife, without your wife, with your lover man/You can kick about your life and grab all that you can".
The remaining track is less cynical, borrowing from the nursery rhyme for the swayalong 'Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son' ("We laughed in the shadows of love's rosy light/We ran on the seashores of our delight/We hid in the hollows of each other's fright/And oh, for the sight and the scent of you. I'm spent of you") though our Tom turns out to be typical cad ("Tom Tom the piper's son, he's stolen my heart and away he's run…You reached out your hand and then pulled it away…You stole my direction in life when you left/Of morrows and yesterdays I am bereft/You're woven in cunning, deception and theft"). A stop gap release prior to her third album, it whets the appetite nicely
Mike Davies
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