A Texan girl who's relocated to Italy, Vanessa Peters is quite some songwriter - certainly quite some lyricist. She plays with words and ideas in an arrestingly intelligent fashion, weaving together in this set of songs figures from myth and legend, personal experience and emotion, real world events and the imaginative life, so that all are part of the same fabric and we can only wonder that we never saw the connections before.
Her opening song (Good News -The Siren Song) is as good an example as any. Sung in the voice of a luckless mermaid, failing to lure any sailors from their passage home, the scenario is clearly fantastical, but the wry reference to continuing war ("good news...this war keeps draggin' on/ and they're sending more sailors out to sea/ to get sucked in by a song") and the closing reference to being the girl left behind that sounds more like confession than fantasy serve to broaden the scope of the song and set the imagination going.
Vanessa's love of a good pun is evident enough in the band title on the album sleeve (V.P. et Ice Cream on Mondays...) and there are plenty more examples scattered throughout, but it's her ability to delve deftly beneath the surface of her subject matter that makes her lyrics memorable.
As to the music - this full band album provides her with a backing of distinctly Lucinda Williams-ish country inflected rock. They're a good band and the drumming is notably solid and no nonsense but I persistently get the feeling that either the band or the production, or both, are not really in tune with what the song needs - they're doing their thing and putting the song at their service, instead of the other way round.
This is particularly true when the guitar features - it consistently comes in too heavily, seemingly insensitive to the mood of the song. These things are difficult to disentangle but I guess the problem is more in the mixing than in the playing itself.
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Vanessa's singing has been compared to Beth Orton's before now - my house guest, unprompted, asked if it was Beth Orton on the player, so I guess there's a fair bit in the comparison. Personally, I think I probably prefer V.P.'s voice; it might not be brightly attractive in a pop-tastic sort of way but she makes a lot of it even if that is sometimes lost in the production on this CD.
Three or four of these songs stand out for their tunefulness, and the album closer (Okay From Now On) is richly satisfying from that point of view, the sort of song that, performed at the end of the set, would pretty much guarantee the encore. The standout track for me though is First Lesson; the lyric comes through clearly starting from a shocking line sung over the descending guitar line played on acoustic guitar: "So this is my first lesson in dying..". Our attention is grabbed and then held as she gives a personal take on 9/11. Good stuff.
She's not a clone of anyone I've ever come across, so hooray for that. Listening closely to the quality of these songs it's a surprise that she hasn't attracted the music biz support that would give her a breakthrough. It's not for the want of trying: "Austin, I Made a Mess" chronicles her failure to catch fire in that particular music city. Can't help feeling though that she's just a step away. Keep an ear out for her
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