ALBUM REVIEWS
There’s a deliberate defiance in the title for Lucy Rose’s fifth album, ‘This Ain’t The Way You Go Out’. Speaking to NME earlier this year, she detailed the health issues she faced post-pregnancy that left her with eight broken vertebrae in her back: “Life was definitely upside down – I couldn’t walk or move, and breathing was excruciating”.
She credits a community of musicians – Paul Weller, US rapper Logic and producer Kwes – as encouraging her to create with freedom as she navigated her recovery. ‘This Ain’t The Way You Go Out’, then, is less about bold statements but recognising the quiet, personal victories on that journey. On ‘Over When it’s Over’ she sings that they’ll find “our way through” an embattled situation with both grit and grace. It’s particularly moving after ‘Could You Help Me’’s appeal for some kind of healing: “Now I’m learning / How terribly lonely illness is / On a hard day / Has there ever been another way?”
Now, she brings in a dancey shuffle to ‘Could You Help Me’ and ‘Life’s Too Short’ and a fearless veracity on ‘The Racket’; these are some of the most interesting and sonically varied songs of her entire career. This is, one hopes, the start of an intriguing new chapter.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Listening to Karin Ann’s debut album ‘Through the Telescope’, you’d be forgiven for not realising that the Slovakian singer-songwriter is just 21-years-old. There is a knowing darkness to this music, which brims with observations earned through experience and the mystique of an author with many stories to tell.
“All his skin eaten by worms / Nothing left there / A pile of bones”, Ann sings on ‘Pile of Bones’. For all its macabre imagery – a through line across the album’s 14 tracks – the song is delivered like a fairytale, with Ann’s soft, ethereal vocals floating like wisps of smoke around its beating heart.
Her singing voice is light, calling to mind the ease and indie droll of Faye Webster and Frankie Cosmos. It all feeds into the album’s curious mix of light and dark, as Ann sings through honeyed whispers of deep emotional strife, from losing faith to leaving childhood behind too early, embedding these dark secrets in twinkling melodies and delicate guitar strings. “The band keeps playing while I continue to cry”, she sings softly on dollhouse-like track ‘The Band Keeps Playing’. “Maybe they won’t see that my dress keeps tearing / And it’s swallowing me”.
Ann’s songwriting is at its strongest when it goes for specifics. There’s queer love song ‘Olivia’, ‘A Song for the Moon’ – a love letter to the darker sides of herself – or ‘My Best Work of Art’, the album’s lovely closer that chronicles Ann’s reclamation of her own identity through the lens of painting and brushstrokes.
After a tough few years fighting illness and cutting her teeth in music, Ann delivers a confident and unflinching debut album. ‘Through The Telescope’ weaves her personal struggles into beautiful, potent songwriting, which she gives space to breathe amidst lush vocals and rich, but never overblown instrumentation. Dancing deftly across folk, rock, country and pop, and spanning emotional landscapes from lovestruck to melancholy, this is a most precocious debut.
