Label: Drowned In Sound
Release Date: 05/05/08
Rating:
Martha Wainwright's first single and track from her long-awaited second album opens with "there are days when the cage doesn't seem to open very wide at all", and we remember just how beautifully this caged bird sings. As she continues we can imagine a beautiful broken-winged maiden in vain trying to find solace in books, instead discovering malice, bitterness or rage in her soul. Yet her subtle chastisement of her beloved knight she tragically once denied soon turns into rain or, as the title suggests, blood - an overwhelming sense of you don't know what you've lost 'til it's lost. A second voice comes in here for the first time - beautiful and cracked, Martha's own over-tracked, her public alter ego. A violin lilts in too, luxuriant but weeping as if to add insult or pathos to injury.
Although these exceptional first few lines musically and lyrically seem to naturally want to lead to an emotional outburst, the actual chorus which follows feels anticlimactic: "and I know you're married, but I've got feelings too/and I still love you". Each line before added something profound and moving, yet the chorus conversely really doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, and it's shoved in to our ears with its old soul style of multivocals straining a single recording mic. Granted, the caged bird might be getting herself some overdue cathartic singing in, but here, and for the rest of the song, she feels much, much too far away from the subtle, delicate creature just a line ago who charmed us with understated majesty.
Jon Parry
Martha Wainwright Official Site
Martha Wainwright Myspace
Submit to:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Comments
No comments yet
