Caroline Martin – 'I Had a Hundred More Reasons to Stay by the Fire' (Small Dog Records) Released 14/02/05

 

A better writer than myself described what she does as “the musical equivalent of plastination – ritually flaying and disembowelling songs and then putting them back together with all their viscera on full display.” I really couldn’t put it better. This album is the acoustic equivalent of Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’ video. All that horror and fear of the monster birthing from the television is captured in six simply played strings and a sweet singing voice that is rarely above conversation levels and often a few levels below. This is not a safe album. No song is longer than it needs be, which means a couple are under a minute long. After all, once the line “Still I didn’t notice,/ That the man up ahead had a knife,/ And I didn’t know if,/ I’d ever be somebody’s wife” there is little more that can be sung that could not be filled in many times worse by the most sedentary of imaginations.

 

This is such a clever album and yet so simple, that it deserves to have its minutiae examined in detail: it doesn’t deserve a review – it deserves an essay. The feminist dialectic of the persona on ‘Like a man’, with the lines “I’ve learned to walk like a man,/ I learned it keeps me safe,/ I’ve learned to not speak my mind,/ It keeps me out of trouble,” is echoed in ‘The Singer’ (“I sold my body to the singer next door”) and ‘On My Way Home’ (“Though I was not pretty, and the boys, they’d never look up”). Coupled with lyrics of revenge, spite (“But I hope this is hurting you”) and dry humour, the album can be interpreted as a feminist rebellion against masculine violence and expectation: “I once told a man,/ that he could keep me safe,/ But he just turned around,/ and kicked me in the face.” This protest is made all the more potent by the steady, calm, resigned delivery.

 

However, this dialectic is turned on its head in ‘Look At Me’ in which the persona willingly plays the victim, casting herself as first the rabbit to the fox, then the chocolate to the shoplifter, willing “to slide down your throat.” Both require a breaking of the law, but when the woman in question can pronounce ‘chocolate’ that way, resistance is futile; the victim has turned victimhood on its head. The sparse, simple plucked arrangements recall a darker English folk tradition, blending the modern into its heritage, much the same as The Be Good Tanyas did with the languages of the hobos of America. As such, some songs are all the more disturbing as we the listener don’t know if they are recalled or contemporary; are they other or autobiographical? When she sings off how “my dad he went crazy, with the noise that covered our home” is that her father she is singing of, or someone else? Cello, drums and backing vocals occasionally add texture, but otherwise this is a steady, flowing, confessional from a woman not afraid to get gritty, and even at her most dark and scary, rarely failing to seduce.