Gemma Hayes – 'The Roads Don’t Love You' (Source) Released 31/10/05

Ok, so she was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize back in 2002, and it’s hard not to fall into comparisons to other successful female singer songwriters of the past fifteen years, (Alanis Morrisette, Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple etc), but there’s no escaping the fact that listening to 'The Roads Don’t Love You' is like listening to the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack. Uninspired, it’s difficult to find a positive thing to say about this album, although your Nan would probably comment on how beautiful her voice is, (and it really is).

'Nothing' Can is probably as close as this album comes to hitting on something close to good, the sound of rain introduces the track and sets you up for the most inspiring lyric on the album “well I go to the country to find myself/crawl back to the city to lose myself again” Helen, sends us into an arbitrary melancholy of past times, and Easy On The Eye will probably end up on the next all woman compilation CD.

Three years have gone by since Hayes’s critically acclaimed debut Night On My Side, you’re left wondering what it is she’s been doing exactly; gone off to LA, teamed up with an array of talented musicians and producers, got a nice tan?
Musically, it’s produced well. The formula for putting together songs to pull on the heartstrings has been followed meticulously. It’s clinical and contrived and lacks the heart that’s needed to sell an album filled with apparent sentimentality. But the fact remains, there are a host of singer songwriters, past and present, who do this a whole lot better; Regina Spector, Imogen Heap, Tim Buckley, Gram Parsons, Damien Rice, Beth Orton… The difference is, that when these guys are singing about love, melancholy, the past, loneliness, hopelessness, joy; you believe that every tear jerking lyric has come from some place deep within their souls.