Natalie Prass
Album: Natalie Prass
Label: Spacebomb
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.natalieprassmusic.com

Stunning. Absolutely stunning. It's easy to get carried away with the hot air of a new artist afforded a great reception, by Natalie Prass' debut feels like a friend for life from the very first listen.

When something like that happens it's always a bit of a surprise, but perhaps it needn't have been. The record appears on the eminently cool and effortlessly assured Spacebomb imprint and is produced by Matthew E White, whose own record Big Inner was rightly received just as rapturously a couple of years ago.

Even so, this record only adds to White's blueprint.

Rooted in the blue collar melting pot of southern soul, there's a direct line that can be drawn from these songs to the best of the output of Fame and Muscle Shoals, not to mention vintage and modern Crescent City R&B, a Nashville skyline and even the side streets of NOLA. Prass has a voice that could have been recorded almost anytime in the last 50 years and wends her songs around musical accompaniment that's equally fluid.

There's a pinch of the Hi! Records' house sound, a little uptown Philly sophistication, some down home country-blues licking, raw swamp inflections and a slick Curtom backbeat, all employed in the service of a voice that can turn from melting rock to freezing hearts in the space of a single syllable.

Make no mistake this is premium stuff. You may have already heard the instantly familiar yet stunningly new Bird of Prey, with its clipped groove coming on like a long lost Willie Mitchell arrangement and Prass' butter-wouldn't-melt vocal. Don't be fooled by its immediacy, those shadows indicate deep waters. Your Fool is a chillingly powerful kiss off blues that only cuts deeper in its sparse reprise with handclaps later in the record. In contrast the lush opener My Baby Don't Understand Me oozes romance with a swinging horn arrangement to boot. For me, the stand out track is Why Don't You Believe In Me with its edgy, spikey, bluesy guitar tripping sound providing a barely controlled setting for Prass' dream-like vocal performance in which she wonders what she has to do to be heard.

It sets the scene perfectly for the closing opus, It Is You, which employs lush (almost sweet) strings to propel a most peculiar showtune that has already been identified as invoking the ghost of Nilsson. Inspired.

I suggest the sooner you make friends with Natalie Prass the happier you'll be.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk