Benita Johnson
Album: Home
Label: Emubands
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.benitajohnson.co.uk

Benita Johnson is a singer/songwriter that I've really got to enjoy over recent years, producing a highly consistent series of mini-albums and full blown releases from her Bristol base and yet somehow her most recent release, "Home" managed to creep under my radar when it was released last year, an event that was not only recently corrected, but also one that thrust that very same album to the forefront of my thought processes.

One of the reasons that I really like Johnson as a song writer is the way that her songs have an everyday feel about them, they are songs of simple observation that have a direct, almost conversational approach that sort of reminds of Michelle Shocked, though with a slightly more English feel to the delivery, though that delivery does have aspects of the Austin scene.

"Home" is an album that really does consist of Benita Johnson and her guitar, fortunately it's an intense relationship, one that allows them to both work in harmony and spark off against each other as the subject matter requires. It allows for the album to deliver across a number of shades and tempos whilst dogmatically sounding like an album of songs, rather than a songbook of an album.

That's not to say the individual songs that make up "Home" aren't songs that stand out in their own right and need the others on the album to give them time and place, far from it, it's more that they are songs that are capable of being part of a group as well as make individual contributions, songs without a sense of ego if you will.

Similarly whilst Johnson seems to have a matter of fact delivery style, you know that it takes a real talent to deliver material in a way that allows the songs to speak for themselves. Benita Johnson is an underestimated singer/songwriter, but the main reason for that is the increasing lack of opportunity to get heard, well there's a chance to correct that by checking out, "Home".

Neil King