It would be easy to lump Canadian-based Linda McLean in with artists such as Lucinda Williams, Kathleen Edwards, and even Aimee Mann; there are certainly the occasional strong similarities.
However, given the relative paucity of successful female singer/songwriters in relation to their male counterparts, it would be the most obvious, and perhaps lazy comparison. In fact, this album is terrific, is well recorded and produced (by John Whynot, who produced Lucinda Williams), and Linda McLean is a Stand Out artist in her own right.
The album, “No Language” is a highly personal collection of songs about the changing of life’s seasons, aspiration and ambition, friendship, and of course, love, and lots of it. McLean unashamedly bears all and sundry, capturing life’s most richest moments and conveys them through her music.
The delightfully catchy “Love nor Money” says what people have been feeling for ages: you can’t get anything genuine anymore, we’re just left with rock singers who “Move their moves, move their mouths, and don’t say a thing”, and “blank faces in high places, rolling by on a merry-go-round.” Moving on to songs of a more personal note, “Almost Alien” is a fast driving track with a gorgeous melody, catchy harmonies, and beautiful vocals. Singing about letting things go and facing the future, “Staring into this lonely night, warm myself with candle light,” her powerful vocals convey both fear and optimism.
Another melancholy ballad singing of painful break-ups is the
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heart-rendering “Lives Change”, and frankly if this doesn’t have you crying into your Pinot Grigot, nothing will. The delightfully jingly “Amsterdam Canals” is contemplative, and evocative of some lovely imagery, involving, well, Canals in Amsterdam mainly, but its great. “Amsterdam Canals/ Johnny Cash is never coming back/ Heard it on the walls/ Broken hearts will remember”, which leads into the seductive and quietly forceful “Burn the Boats”, ahhhhh, what a tune to sink into. McLeans’ vocals, formerly powerful and feisty all of a sudden become incredibly vulnerable, resolving with a stunning, near primal vocal arrangement, not entirely dissimilar to Sarah McLachlan.
The genre to which McLean belongs is notorious for its hand-on-heart, heart-on-sleeve quality, but in this album, brutal honesty is achieved without a smidgen of pretension. More so, it screams the notion that although we all get older, we don’t change much in our heads. Really we’re still all trying to work things out, and it’s ok to do that, which in itself is quite heartening.
“No Languge” is a Rockin Muther Trucker well worth getting hold of, and Linda McLean is a Rock Goddess. Fact.
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