Annette Buckley – 'Ever Changing Colours Of The Sea' (RMG) Released 27/05/2005

 

It must be very tough to be a female songwriter. Seriously. It must be constantly depressing to continually see yourself billed as "singer-songwriter"; for Buckley, being from the Emerald Isle, this pigeonholing must be regularly prefixed by ‘Irish’, as if this sub-genre definition would give a more accurate description. This brilliant and challenging album might easily have been called 'I am and am not an Irish singer-songwriter', but such labels are far from a complete description.

 

Opener 'Her Winters Coat' plunges us straight into the unnerving and borderline insane landscape-informed music of Kate Bush. Elsewhere 'So Free' is pure Portishead, while the modern and traditional torch songs, blues ballads, rock, pop, Gregorian chants and something approaching instrumental, glitchy, folktronica all appear and contribute to the denial of genre, the shrugging off of labels. 'Honeysuckle', a modern traditional pastoralist torch song will please the ears of those who don’t like their music too radical (or their women too rebellious), 'Grey Love' moves this theme forward into a more jaded territory, the realisation within the lines “everyone is searching for,/ Love,/The very hopes of you” of that old maximum that “in the first instance the woman loves her lover, thereafter she is in love with love.” However Gigwise's favourite 'Into Your Arms', offers a very different femininity. Its reinterpretation of the slutty, selfishness of the traditional female characterisation in fairy tales, with balletic, teasing, harpsichord, would wash over the casual listener, but attention to the detail catches the way the word play on the line “into your arms” sounds like “into your whore arms”, and note the self-centred, self-deceiving promises the drive the narrative forward: “I rescue me underneath the tree,/I promise me, that you’ll wait for me.”

 

Well, at least, that’s our reading of the lines. Like the sea, she can abandon the calm delivery and pick up into heavier, almost upbeat, swells of sound, as on the near-club atmospherics of 'Tangled', but she never really casts off her dark mantle. This is perhaps the only real fault of the album; for all the colours and tones on her pallet, Buckley rarely manages to evoke anything in a brighter and lighter mood – the album is mostly greys, and blues, some touches of green and plenty of purple patches, but now patches of dancing yellow sunlight or shimmering bright green. No matter, we haven’t heard anything that we’ve wanted to listen to again and again, for quite a while before this. And more people should definitely use harpsichords.