Amy Speace
Album: Not That Kind Of Girl
Label: Windbone
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.amyspeace.com

Although there are thousands upon thousands of musicians in the world releasing albums, only relatively few of them can be relied upon to maintain the sort of quality and consistency that means you can buy with confidence, knowing that you will not be disappointed. Amy Speace is one of them. Starting out as an actress, mostly performing Shakespeare in NYC fringe and experimental theatre, over the course of a musical career that kicked off in 2002 with the self-released Fable, she has released five albums, two for Judy Collins' Wildflower label before launching her own Windbone imprint.

Following on from 2013's critically acclaimed How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat, this is her sixth, one that, recorded live over three days with producer Neilson Hubbard with a band that includes Will Kimbrough on guitar, My Morning Jacket's Carl Broemel on pedal steel and vocal backups from, among others, Rod Piccott and Ben Glover (who also co-wrote two tracks), traces the path of a doomed smalltown love affair through a range of moods and styles.

It opens in the first flush of passion with the prescient lyric of the slow southern country-soul Nothing Good Can Come Of This with weeping violin courtesy Eamon McLoughlin, easing into the pedal steel backed Come Pick Me Up, a duet with John Moreland. By the time it gets to the hook-laden, punchy Better Than This there's already an awareness sthat things might not be going as smoothly as hoped as she sings "I cleared you out some space. You never quite unpacked. There's no way to know if you're running off or if you're coming back."

The first of the Glover co-writes, Three Days heads into slow burn moaning gospel blues territory packed with Biblical imagery, organ and gutsy guitar underscoring the molten emotions before the mood switches for the title track, a piano led sad, soulful slow waltz of self-realisation that the affair has no future where she asks "Why would you open a door you could never walk through? Why lay the cards on the table when I couldn't choose?' as her voice and the band's backing rise and fall.

Co-written with Beth Neilson Chapman, one of the album's emotional highlights, One Man's Love is a spare piano ballad with an almost folk-hymnal feel as she sings about being the other woman ("She and I shared a lie even though we never met. Both deceived, we both believed the promises he never could have kept"). Her world having fallen apart, there's now the attempt to endure, something for which, again co-writing with Glover, she strikes a stirring Celtic-hued Salvationist note on the aptly titled march rhythm Hymn For The Crossing, Glover and Garrison Starr providing the back up vocals.

Even so, out on the road, she's still clinging to hope ("I won you back and I've lost before I'll be waiting for your knocking on my door") in the frisky fiddle country hoedown In Chicago, staying with dreamy old time country for Trouble Looks Good On You with its steel, mandolin and sprinkle of lazy muted New Orelansy jazzy trumpet.

The final farewell comes with the achingly lovely waltz Raincoat which features arguably the album's finest line, summing up the story's arc in the simple refrain "you were my raincoat, now you're the rain." The final two tracks find her in reflective mood. Given a Appalachian folk ballad setting, Strange Medicine is a jaw-droppingly unexpected lyrical ball of despair, loss, rejection and recrimination as, visiting a childhood haunt along the shore, she sings how "My mother cast me out with her prayers to keep the shame from burning her skin" before ending with a list of all that has let her down, from family to her lies, grief and, finally God.

You need to recover from this, and so it is that, while acknowledging the hurt will always remain, the album ends with some kind of acceptance and healing ("now that I'm not so broken. Now that I'm not afraid2) in Epilogue (I Don't Know How To Stop Loving You), an Emmylou-like cathartic ballad graced with the poignant line "You know you never really told me when you knew that you chose her. So I folded you inside my dreams, like an old concert poster."

On the inner sleeve there's a photo of Speace sitting on a desk, straddling a poster on which is written the word 'flawed'. However she may feel about herself, this is one word you could never apply to her music.

Mike Davies