Brooke Sharkey
Album: One Dress
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 13
Website: http://brookesharkey.co.uk/

One of the Fatea team caught up with Brooke Sharkey when she played a gig on a boat on the Thames earlier in the year. He tipped me off about the quality of her performance via a live review and I immediately went out and bought her ep, "May" and offered her a slot on the Fatea Showcase Session Autumn 12:Pathways.

In the meantime I managed to get to see her play live when she shared a double-header set with Adam Beattie when they played The Den at Cambridge Folk Festival earlier this year and have appeared on each other recordings before and since. It was a great set and so there was a lot expected from Brooke's album, "One Dress" before laser had even touched pit.

Part of Brooke's formative years were spent in France and that period can be heard in the way she's put the album together, not just because she occasionally drops into French during the course of a song, more so because there is a continental café sophistication that provides a real sense of definition to the release.

The songs are a pure joy to listen to, there is a richness brought about by elegant use of strings that gives a smoky, almost sultry atmosphere for Brooke's clear and sharp voice to cut through. The voice it's self seems to find a middle ground between Edith Piaf and Annie Brings, carrying the raw emotional strength of the former and blending it with the iconic directness of the latter, ensuring that not a syllable is lost.

"One Dress" is full of songs that you can really lose yourself in, spend time exploring, it's not just the words and music, it's the way they are expressed, inflections that help the songs twist and turn, subtlety trying to avoid definition, whist ensuring they remain total accessible.

There is an impressionist quality to the sleeve of "One Dress" and it's exactly the right term to describe the music of Brooke Sharkey as her sound seems to absorb so many of the ideals of that movement. This is an album that can be fiery, absorbing, a feeling, a sense of being, in short a wonderful listening experience and, in the right time and place, the soundtrack of seduction.

Neil King