Mo Kenney
Album: In My Dreams
Label: New Scotland
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.mokenney.com

It's not often an aspiring artist has a famous popular musician come to talk to their class about their craft, it's even fewer who later get a call-back to say that they are recommending their label sign them up...that however is precisely what happened to the young Canadian singer-songwriter Mo Kenney when East Coast rock icon, Joel Plaskett, paid a visit to her school. Plaskett played a big part in recording Kenney's lauded debut album Mo Kenney, her second album, In My Dreams, will be released on September 04, a year after its Canadian appearance; again Plaskett is a major contributor playing drums, base and organ on an album cut in his new studio, New Scotland Yard, Nova Scotia.

Who knows why Canada produces so many great female singer-songwriters but Kenney is up there with them all, even if she appears an elfin waif beside the likes of KD Laing. Her insightful and occasionally lacerating lyrics, her tunefulness and her finger-picking guitar perhaps place her in a bracket with the very British Laura Marling.

The album opens with 'I Faked It', one of three songs co-written with Plaskett. The lightness of the delivery seems at odds with the meanness of the words until you realise she really just didn't care - the disregard for the other's feelings is carried as lightly as the song! The tables are turned on the title track when it's the songwriter herself who is wistfully wondering whether the relationship matters or even exists.

Kenney suggests through the gentle harmonies of Dancing that she may have rekindled a relationship on a mutual basis.

Wind will blow, is again about a relationship, the delivery is tentative and suggestive that love may be as ephemeral as the wind.

Kenney's first single, Telephones, is taken from the album and unlike most of the tracks is a cover, but the melodic nature of the song and its catchy chorus are well suited to her voice and chunky rhythm guitar playing. The sardonic humour of the lyrics could easily have been her own.

This recording method and the prominent use of vintage keyboards has paid real dividends in the warm and rich sound of In My Dreams, one that remains built around Kenney's emotionally eloquent voice. The sultry and almost mocking tone to her voice seen in Mountains to the Mess, helps add an extra layer of substance to the rather placid album, which then evolves into, Untouchable, a track containing the same notes of electric and jazz similar to Jamie Woon, Mount Kimbie and James Blake accompanied by a vocal powerhouse akin to that of Adele. The rich harmonies on the record are all Mo's own, and they add a real resonance to such other tunes as Field Song and Pretty Things.

Overall this is an easy album to listen to, sitting in the cross-over between folk and pop, the tone is warm, the voice is easy on the ear, there is little to trouble the conscience other than issues of emotional integrity, the musicianship is impeccable.

Mo Kenney will be playing various venues throughout September.

Leah Parker-Turnock