Vanessa Peters
Album: With The Sentimentals
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.vanessapeters.com

M.C. Hansen and the boys have clearly been busy of late. Hot on the heels of their collaboration with Jonathan Byrd comes this one with Texas-based Americana singer-songwriter Peters, artists who have frequently shared tours, but never previously worked together . The album's the result of two separate sessions with the band in Denmark, the first laying down five songs in less than a day at a pop up farmhouse studio in the countryside, and the second recorded at the more permanent Magic Music Studio in Kragevig.

The tracks aren't ordered chronologically, the songs from the first session largely being sandwiched between those from the second, which kick off with the guitar-chimingly pretty and melodic Pacific Street, a song by Hem's Dan Messe that contains definite hints of Sting's Fields of Gold. It's the only cover, the first of the Peters numbers coming with the reverb guitar backed Call You All The Time, a light, summery shuffle with a train time rhythm about trying too hard to spark a relationship while Big Time Underground (one of three songs revisited from her back catalogue), with its slightly brittle key parts, casts the events of a break up in terms of acting out a part as she asks whether he intends to go for an Oscar or an independent film award in placing the blame.

Things then shift to the first session as a more folksy approach in contrast to the pop-rock colours elsewhere, Mostly Fictions another end of relationship number with an airy feel, tumbling melody and shimmering cymbals giving way, in turn, to The Choice, another track from the second get together, with its spare keyboard pattern unfolding into a fuller sound as the lyrics reflect on the aftermath of a break-up and how "it's not the peace that's eluding me, it's the war I never fought." Minimal, nervy keyboard notes (provided by husband Rip Rowan) also underpin Fickle Friends , brushed snare and frugal electric guitar further etching the atmosphere behind Peters' pure vocals. Fireworks (a rework from Little Film) maintains that subdued, slow-tempo mood, the lyric speaking of closure ("I can take your picture down now and put up ones of happier times and not be afraid of your angry ghost") before returning to the second session with Light, a more musically muscular number with a clever relationship-themed lyric about not seeing the effort taken for the parts that remain unfinished. The last of the initial recordings comes with Afford To Pretend (originally on her 2006 Blackout EP), another musically skeletal and lyrically reflective song about things left undone and choices made before, bringing the running thematic thread to a close, the album ends on Getting By, Hansen's bare electric guitar bones , Jacob Chano's hushed percussion and a pulsing keyboard line gradually building to a flourish as Peters sings about "trying to make the best of a pretty good situation" even though "some days I'm barely getting by", closing on a note of tentative hoper and positivity, living in the present not as a ghost of the past, "learning you bit by bit."

A new solo album is also planned for this year, but, while this was only intended as a quickie one-off, such are the warm and engaging results that it is to be hoped that both parties find the time to get back in the studio together again at some point.

Mike Davies