Eileen Rose
Album: Be Many Gone
Label: Holy Wreckords
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.eileenrose.com

With Be Many Gone, Eileen (birth name Eileen Rose Giadone), with the help of collaborative partner and producer Rich Gilbert, is launching her own record label. This signals an even greater confidence in her ability to cut it as a performing songwriter, although her steadily rising star has been apparent over the course of the preceding releases.

And yet Eileen's history is not exactly straightforward; cutting her teeth on the Boston, Mass. music scene and looking to British acts like Kate Bush, Bowie and Elton John as much as American stars like Ronstadt and Glen Campbell, before bringing out an album with her band Daisy Chain at the start of the 90s. She then relocated to London, and made two albums for Rough Trade before 2000's Shine Like It Does, recorded with members of Alabama 3, and 2002's Long Shot Novena, which sported an even more diverse musical support crew; after these successes, Eileen hopped back to Boston, releasing Come The Storm on Judy Collins' Wildflower label, followed by At Our Tables, recorded in Detroit and released in 2008, and finally Luna Turista, recorded in 2009 in Nashville, where she'd met up with new-wave guitarist (and member of Frank Black and Tanya Donnelly bands) Rich.

The enigmatically-titled Be Many Gone finds Eileen now even more steeped in the ethos of the Nashville musical community, with knowing homages to country heritage alongside other honky-tonk, tex-mex and R&B flavours. Well-managed though this musical brew undoubtedly is, however, in the end it comes across as less than unified, simply due to the at times slightly undistinguished nature of Eileen's writing for much of this new set. Eileen's clearly contented with her lot and comfortable with trying on different outfits from her musical wardrobe over the course of these nine songs, but none of them last for longer than the suiting of the occasion that each song presents to the world. Each taken on their own terms, fine and dandy - but I can't get entirely fired by the collection as a whole; and the lamentable absence of even a tracklisting (let alone song notes or personnel credits) from the press package is even more infuriating in this context.

David Kidman