Evangeline Gentle - Evangeline Gentle (Album Review)
Scottish-born singer-songwriter Evangeline Gentle moved to Canada at the age of 11 and was winning awards by the age of 18. This debut - which follows the acapella EP You And I, released earlier in the year - has been three years in the making and is assured and mature, brimming with the kind of lyrical clarity and songwriting skill that many artists spend a career chasing. Lovingly produced by Jim Bryson, it is as comforting and spacious as a velvet-curtained ballroom that you and your significant other find you have all to yourselves.
Gentle’s piercing, vibrato-heavy vocal steers us through opener ‘Drop My Name’ with a languid feistiness not dissimilar to The Cardigans’ Nina Persson. The more emotional ‘Ordinary People’ that follows put me immediately in mind of Patty Griffin at her heartrending best. Quite apart from having the stealthiest banjo line you’ll hear this year, the track shines a light on Gentle’s positive, philosophical outlook on life with the repeated line: “It’s brave to be hopeful in this world/It’s brave to be kind” and kicks off what seems to be the album’s main theme of love as sanctuary and tenderness as salvation. This could easily be dismissed as naïve idealism but there’s a disarming simplicity to proceedings - and to the lyrics in particular - that renders any such argument redundant. And, as the record progresses, resistance to the old romantic sentiments of this 23 year-young artist is futile.
The heady abandon of a love affair in its prime is wonderfully sketched on ‘Sundays’, impeccably arranged with Gentle’s voice sitting atop pumping electric bass, restrained guitars and a perfectly warped keyboard wash. One of my favourite lines: “Lust is almost always never love” appears on the cautionary tale ‘Even If’, which has a retro soul feel (think Duffy with the drama dialled down) before we arrive at the album’s middle with the similarly vintage ‘So It Goes’, evoking a fireside Carole King.
This classic balladry reaches a peak with ‘The Strongest People Have Tender Hearts’, which, again, makes the case for spiritual growth versus superficial gain: “We’re searching in change-room stalls of fast fashion stores and malls/Just to pay the wage of a billionaire, somewhere”. The broody pop of ‘Long Time Love’ and the jaunty strum of ‘Neither Of Us’ pale somewhat in its shadow before the regretful ‘Digging My Grave’ gets things back on track. The sparse, plaintive closer ‘Good and Guided’ further distils the motif of striving for grace and peace without any sense of repetition or fatigue. It is in fact full of life, with the vocal soaring aloft in a way that can’t fail to stir the stubbornest and most cynical of hearts, about which, I suppose, I may know a thing or two.
If I had a complaint about this record (and trust me, I’m struggling to find many) it would be that stylistically, it is unwilling to commit. It would have been all too easy to hem these songs into an Americana dress or slather them in beats but the conscious resistance to genre makes it feel untethered and, at times, aimless. It does, however, give Gentle a free ticket to go anywhere next, which is artistically liberating but it limits the character of this otherwise impressive collection of songs. Of course, you could argue that Evangeline Gentle’s singular voice is character enough all by itself and in the end you’d probably be right. In any case, this album is a significant achievement and a formidable start to a career that I can only see getting better and better.
Review by Rich Barnard.
The self-titled album by Evangeline Gentle is out now via Sonic Unyon Records.
A new name to me, but based on the new EP, ‘Tigers in Your Backyard (Nocturnal Edition)’, Molly Murphy is one to watch. Initially, Molly embarked on a promising college career as a double Film and English Major pursuing a career in screenwriting but left all that behind to form a band (as you do). Murphy’s latest release finds the singer-songwriter adding a modern sheen to her traditional Celtic roots.