Maura Kennedy
Album: Villanelle
Label: Varese Sarabande
Tracks: 15
Website: http://www.maurakennedy.com

The eternally-prolific Kennedys have certainly been busy! Each half of the husband-and-wife duo has produced a solo album this year – Pete’s determinedly one-man effort came out a few months ago, shortly after the latest duo album West, and now here’s Maura’s ostensibly solo record, an intelligent project for which she teamed up with Californian poet B.D. Love – he provided original poetry which Maura miraculously naturally converted into melodic outpourings but somehow without compromising their form.

As regards the title term/concept, the word villanelle refers to a 19-line poetic form of quite a bewilderingly complex nature, the more severely technical niceties of which probably need not concern the reader, at any rate at this stage. But even this level of realisation makes Maura’s achievement even more stunning, for the challenge appears so daunting as to be literally mind-boggling, if not impossible. The really amazing thing is that listening to the music on this album betrays not an inkling of the exigencies of the villanelle form – indeed, each track sounds for all the world uncannily like a true song. Idiomatic almost to a fault, this collection moves effortlessly through musical styles, from the soft-spoken title song to brooding jangle (Borrowed Dress) to psych-folk-pop (Fireflies), banjo-flecked roots (Soldier’s Wife) and cajun (Mockingbird) to lazy honky-tonk (I’ll Be Alone Tonight) and swamp-soul (She Worked Her Magic On Me), which comes complete with a gorgeous nylon-strung-guitar break.

Some tracks (eg. Beneath The Mistletoe, I Cried To Dream Again) don’t entirely work for me on a purely musical basis, but Maura always seems to be able to conjure Love’s imagery and concerns through her specially composed melodies, and to realise this vision she’s helped out by a small but perfectly formed support crew which mostly consists of multitracked multi-instrumentalist husband Pete (of course). Maura’s liner note modestly reveals that the whole project took only 5½ weeks to fully write and record – wow!

This is empathic artistic creativity in full flight, the true extent of which I suspect will never completely reveal itself to even the most attentive, perceptive and literate of listeners (except perhaps those possessing a deeper, detailed understanding of the villanelle concept and structure). The latter technical aspect is in fact almost irrelevant to the appreciation of its music as supremely accessible rootsy folk-pop, but that’s not to undersell the nature or extent of its tremendous creative achievement. In fact, there’s almost too much to take in – an impression that’s partly accentuated by the inclusion of lyrics in the ample accompanying booklet, although I personally really welcome the chance to actually read Love’s poetry while listening to the disc.

David Kidman