Lotte Mullan
Album: Love's Bonfire
Label: Absolute/Raindog
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.lottemullan.com/

I first encountered Mullan five years ago, in the middle of a Café Nero tour, playing to bemused but appreciative coffee shop customers and was immediately smitten with her personality (unassuming, warm and witty), her music (country, blues, 60s pop) and voice (a feathery meld of Eddi, Loretta , Dolly and Emmylou), not to mention the quality and emotional resonance of the songs from her debut album, Plain Jane.

Disappointingly, overnight success has taken a further five years (partly to her admirable insistence on not becoming part of the music industry machine), during which time the proposed film based on her blog seems to have become mired in development hell and the only releases have been a revised version of the debut that added the superb Thank God She's Not Pretty and her cover of Labi Siffre's It Must Be Love, the download only Kismet Diner (from the award-winning short film of the same name, featuring Valentine and live solo acoustic versions of three new numbers), her almost impossible to find rework of Madonna's eponymous debut and last year's little-heralded Claw Marks EP, of which all but the title number appears on this much anticipated sophomore album.

While her debut was recorded here, for the follow-up she took herself off to Nashville and hooked up with Seattle alt-country outfit Band of Horses whose bassist, Bill Reynolds, also produced. The years between releases have seen her voice season and the little girl innocence of yore sounds more worldly wise and steeped with experience, bringing an extra emotional resonance to these thematically-threaded songs of bruised and battered hearts that range from vulnerable to venomous, heart-wrenching confessional to scathing kiss-offs, hurt and hope meeting somewhere in the middle.

She says she wanted to work with "a hairy rock band" to bring bolder colours to her sound, and there's certainly a clutch of punchy, full-blooded numbers here; the splenetic I Hope It Breaks Your Heart single with its loping bassline, Wake Up Next To You, its envy-drenched desire driven by skittering percussion and plangent desert noir guitar (a radical departure from the live acoustic version), the soaring, distorted guitars and keyboards that give wings to the chorus of I'm Still Here, a song about keeping the spark of romance alive as the years of familiarity mount up, and the moody, military drum pattered Bad For Me with a lyric steeped in themes of addiction, revenge and romantic masochism as she sings 'you're the salt in my wound, you're the sting in my tail.' Best of all, though, is the harmonica wailing, swaying folk-rock of Jonathon, a scathing attack on the ageing titular macho man who treats women like trophies and who holds his crutch 'like a crucifix', any pity for his self-inflicted loneliness torpedoed when he's once again 'waiting like a crocodile 'til the boat goes down.'

Not quite as musically muscular, but still keeping the mood in a higher gear, the (Kirsty MacColl) pop sensibility of I Don't Believe You (all clattering drumsticks and ringing power chords) revisits the can't live with you, can't live without you theme of Bad For Me with 'Trouble is we've got this spark, Keeps us together and tears us apart, We're enemies and best of friends, Our favourite part is making up again.' Likewise, one of the album's darkest, most poignant lyrics, the country chugging Dear Elvis which, with hints of Dolly Parton, is sung in the voice of a 50s child writing to the King because, although bullied by her husband, 'mother, she stops crying when you're on the radio.'

The power of music to bring release and, at least temporary salvation, is also echoed in the album's opening cut, one of the three slower, quieter and more reflective numbers, which, for me, is where she most excels. America On My Mind (though the album sleeve has its listed as Americana On My Mind) is wistfully lovely, breathily-sung folksy acoustic number that conjures thoughts of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne as she sings of a brief doomed romance with a California lover, the ashes of which linger on in the rhymes of her songs as she says 'I read all of his love letters, knowing I could write them better.'

One of Mullan's self-confessed touchstones, Patsy Cline, lights the flame to the torch-burning slow waltz, It's Not True Love, pedal steel, slide and fuzztone guitar accentuating the inevitable as she observes how 'you will break her heart and then you'll break your own.' And yet, despite enough evidence that would make a cynic of Romeo, Mullan clings to the hope that, whatever pain it may ultimately bring, love still exists. It's this which is the molten core of the albums final, and finest, heartbreaking track, You Must've Loved Him Once. Introduced by churchy organ, it's a deeply personal, emotion-wracked song in which, to simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, Mullan redolent of the saddest moments of Eddi Reader, Janis Ian and Roberta Flack, delivers an open letter to her parents, who divorced when she was young, writing of the faith that she was born from love, recalling how 'You were God til I was seven, then you just fell out of heaven' and her own search for love that 'found you in a thousand faces', before ending on a memory of happy family moments ('the three of us spinning holding hands') and the acknowledgement that, while we may be our parents' children, we are not fated to repeat their lives and that we have to accept ourselves as our own person, that 'we walk this road together, we walk this road alone.' Copies of the song should be available on prescription from every therapist, the album in the home of anyone who's ever had a broken heart.

Mike Davies