As we’re moving towards the festive season, I thought I’d
mess the posts up a bit by doing a couple of short series (four or five albums
at a time) over the week where we can explore the wealth with each other. First
up it’s The Ladies.
I think I'm falling in love again.
Maybe I've been a little bit in love with very girl
singer I've ever listened to - From Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw to Keren of
Bananarama and Patti Palladin. Annabel Lamb is a blind date, yet already I know
from repeated plays of "Once Bitten" that she's a soft, sensual
seductress. With a voice that drips with honey-coated tenderness over a crushed
heart of bitter experience, she transcends the accepted limits of female
vocalists and instead (like Grace Jones, like Marianne Faithfull) she immerses
herself in the emotions of her music. A song such as "Take Me In Your
Arms" evokes a wistful melancholy desire for love and lust that far
outstrips the trite limits of a "love song". It aches for physical
reassurance, throbs with a need for warmth and affection, yet has an
indefinable romantic quality of sheer pleasure through the fantasy longings of
the lyric. There's a tremendous human frailty at work here; the sympathetic,
supportive understanding of lovers' failures and regrets: not in any slushy,
over-sentimental manner - sure, there's a lot of sentiment, which is a
different thing altogether - but with the cold, steely-eyed logic of one so
shattered by betrayal that tears are a thing of the past. The sleeve starts the
muted mood that is somehow articulated more poignantly by the wailing saxophone
on "Dividing The Spoils Of Love" than even by that song's explanation
that "it's too late now, I'll be leaving soon, I can hear the car, All
these rooms seem strange to me." In truth, with her weary down-trodden
desire for love in danger of being smothered by continual dismay and distrust,
Annabel Lamb shares more with Ellen Burstyn in Alice doesn't live here anymore
than with any other pretty young torch chanteuse. Even amidst such reflective
mournful material - and the quality of her song-writing is wonderfully strong-
Annabel retains and unbowed spirit that boasts both the rough edges that make
Grace Jones such an exciting interpreter of emotions and the smooth sensuality
that Annie Lennox brings to the Eurythmics' glowing music.
With songs like hypnotic instrumental "Snake
Pliskin" and "Backwards through the looking glass", Annabel Lamb
is a talent to be cherished.
And loved.
JOHNNY WALLER