Reviews

Artist:Thea Gilmore
Album: These Quiet Friends
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.theagilmore.net/

For her second covers album, following Loft Music in 2003, Thea Gilmore has taken a different approach. Where the earlier album "was full of songs that I wished I'd written," These Quiet friends is "an album of songs that have seen me through dark times."

And it is a revealing song choice. Opening with the standard Cabaret, accompanied only an acoustic guitar, she dives Sweet Child Of Mine. It's hardly the first folk based cover, as Slash's iconic guitar figure translates so well to almost any instrument, but her interpretation challenges the original to be the definitive version. Heartfelt and intimate.

Gilmore says "There are maybe some unexpected tracks here, but every one of them has marked a point in my journey so far. Only music can do that I think, become such an intrinsic part of a tiny little life that without those words and that melody, your story wouldn't have come out the same. "Singing these songs has given me a way to reconnect to that history... that arsey, hard shell, soft inside 90's kid with a head for poetry."

The Killing Moon is one of those songs that as soon as you hear her version you wonder why it wasn't always sung like this. Light years away from the anthemic original, it again has a warmth and homespun familiarity which will win over the most diehard Bunnymen fan. Attempting another standard, Carl Sigman's Crazy He Calls Me, invites comparison with everyone from Billie Holiday and Anita O'Day to Linda Ronstadt and Aretha Franklin. It's a tribute to Thea Gilmore's singing that she just adds to the list of notable versions and breezes through the weight of history that covering a song like this inevitably carries.

Some of the other "unexpected" songs would include REM's Everybody Hurts. She makes this her own, by taking another song which has such a well known "big" performance to live up to. The same applies to Springsteen's Dancing in The Dark, which dispenses with the epic production, replacing it with overlapping acoustic guitar lines, and vocals treated with a chorus effect. In taking these "rock classics" and doing something so radically different Thea Gilmore has stripped the songs back the bare bones of the writing and rebuilt them.

Before it started, I assumed Wrecking Ball would be the Neil Young song which Emmylou Harris covered so well. But no, this is Miley Cyrus. That she feels a connection to a pop banger like this may be the most unexpected choice of all, but it turns out to be the unquestionable album highlight. After that emotional highpoint, the album closes with Tonight You Belong To Me, made famous by Patience and Prudence in 1956, but which I'm guessing she picked up from its use in an especially unsettling scene in TV show American Horror Story.

A fascinating selection of songs which given her assertion that these songs are "the 2am confidantes that you can reach for when no-one else is around," suggests that even for an artist with 20 albums of her own under her belt, the power of music to support her life journey is still a tangible thing, and for that we should be very grateful.

Tim Martin

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