GypsyFingers
Album: Circus Life
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.gypsyfingers.com/

This duo brings together the songwriting skills of Victoria Coghlan and the production skills of Luke Oldfield (son of Mike), here delivering for their debut release an extremely assured, and very much attention-grabbing, set of self-penned songs that examine the well-worn themes of life, loss, love and dreams in a stimulating and original way that owes much to Victoria's experience of composing music for the cinema and small screen.

Both Luke and Victoria are accomplished multi-instrumentalists too, and such is the strength of their self-belief, and their clear understanding of each other's musical expertise, that they're able to present a unified artistic vision. Luke's special achievement is his production allows Victoria's own lyrical and musical contributions to breathe within an often surprisingly dense texture that ingeniously interweaves both acoustic and electric instruments in an appealing, accessible yet continually interesting folk-pop backdrop whose brightness of expression ensures that the listener isn't depressed by the reflective nature of those lyrics. Circus Elephant is a good example of this contrast, with its breezy brass somehow emphasising the plight of the central figure in the story.

The swooning sonic environment of Steel Bones (an album highlight) yields to an eerie, half-choked expression for Lump, with further almost psychedelic keyboard meanderings pulling the lyric in a different direction altogether. Throughout the disc, though, Victoria's singing voice is magnificent and supremely imaginative, sometimes mixing (often within the same song) passages of soaring melody with quickfire, almost rapping stream-of-conscience wordplay: this technique works particularly well on You and Lately, and I like the way the words are allowed to be both considered and savoured while the pace never lets up (in this respect it reminded me a bit of some of the Chumbawamba successes from their Enough Is Enough phase).

Just occasionally, as on opening track This Is The Way, Victoria's use of the glottal stop seems a touch mannered on first hearings, but it's easy to get used to it after a while. Finally, Luke takes on the delicate, pained lead vocal duty for the intensely beautiful closing number The Island (his own composition), which builds to a blissfully double-edged coda; his voice also emerges earlier in the running-order for Return (for which he shares composition credit with Victoria). The empathic partnership that is Gypsyfingers shows the two musicians to be the proud possessors of a unique blend of sounds and images, and this album is a powerful and honest artistic statement: one which I believe heralds the beginning of something rather special.

David Kidman