It sometimes feels like 50% of every piece of music released is by a female singer-songwriter, to the point where you have to wonder if any women out there aren’t releasing solo records at any given moment in time. The arrival of another such release into my review pile doesn’t naturally fill me with joy, but that’s no reason to discount it immediately.
Christina Courtin’s brand of country infused retro-pop (think of She & Him with a western twang) is likely to be causing outbreaks of tumescence in the Radio 6 studios; it’s slightly quirky, with off kilter vocals and jolly twee arrangements that often demand a vociferous foot tap or two. ‘Foreign Country’ is great. It’s like listening to country music from a transistor radio during the Blitz. It’s builds into a whirly finale and then just disappears just as you’re getting into it.
‘Hedonistic Paradise’ is the country Carpenters having a bit of ballad moment – it’s both charming and heartfelt. She does fragile without pulling her sleeves over her hands and turning into disaffected. ‘Mulberries’ is your more typical piano lament, a song to take or leave, really, one to throw on in the background of your nearest hotel reception area.
There’s enough on here for this not to be run of the mill. She has a great talent and on this, her debut, she shows a great versatility around her brand of singer-songwriting. Without the clutch of musicians supporting her, things could have disappeared into the painfully dull some time around track six. ‘February’ enjoys a great instrumental with beats section, before adding layers of strings, all of which stops you from concluding that it’s just another bleeding ballad. ‘Laconia’ might cover black-eyed beauty until Amy Winehouse recovers from the DT’s enough to lay down some more tracks.
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The problem here is the slow song overload. The highlights of this album stem from the catchy lively numbers that make you feel enthusiastic. The wave of low tempo efforts, however, are a little like meeting an effortlessly negative person for the first time – you feel a little drained in their company almost immediately and start making contingency plans for never being trapped in the same pub as them again. That, or you just have to grab them by the cheeks and scream ‘cheer the fuck up’ until they seem to get the message. A couple more lively ones would have given me more hope and would have gone some way to maintaining the enthusiasm displayed at the beginning of this review.
This album is well composed, has a reasonable amount of variety and doesn’t drift into the formulaic throughout. It’s somewhere between a country pop record and a recital, which will bring great joy to many people who get the chance to hear it. Job done, really. It’s not to my taste, but don’t let that put you off.
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