Rosalie Cunningham – To Shoot Another Day (Esoteric Antenna)
Along with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, Rosalie Cunningham has quietly established herself as one of the pre-eminent singer/songwriter/instrumentalists currently working. Her voice alone would be enough to separate her from the crowd, but what truly sets her apart is her spectacularly singular songwriting – fiendish melodies woven around musical styles plucked from the ether; lyrics like acupuncture from Luke Haines. She manages to be both reverential and tersely dismissive of her influences and targets in equal measure, heart on both sleeves and a bit on the floor for good measure. Her songs feel like discoveries of priceless artefacts in a charity shop – the sharp tang of a Prostian rush on the tongue followed by wide-eyed wonder as to everyone else’s folly in overlooking them.
The title track, as the name rather suggests, is Cunningham’s take on a Bond theme – chords scrunched up in an angry fist and released in a shimmer of trilling piano keys. It veers towards vaudeville on occasion, the piano honky-tonking rather than glowering, though this feels absolutely in keeping with her desire to play the music inside her head rather than what convention expects or demands.
‘Timothy Martin’s Conditioning School’ has the air of Kinks-ian disregard for American culture, celebrating the minutiae of British life with a verse of ‘Happy Birthday’ thrown in for good measure. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘Heavy Pencil’ takes the theme to ‘The Good Life’ and adds a squelching bass, fuzz guitar and a dash of Brian Auger. By the end of the track, we’ve shifted from Richard Briers cosiness to some manic flute antics and some sax outtakes from the ‘Pink Panther’ sessions. It’s not in any way being wilfully perverse, it’s simply that sometimes earthquakes happen on the same day that aliens land. It’s unexpected and there’s no preparing for it, but it’s no excuse not to put up your feet and let the action flow before you and resolve to go with whatever happens.
‘Good to be Damned’ and ‘In the Shade of the Shadows’ threaten to be the tracks that take us to the Hammer horror staircases but instead wind themselves around the bannisters and dangle like wrought iron earrings. There’s no doubt that this album has a lighter and airier tone than much of her previous work, but what remains are cascading scales and stomach-shifting key changes which appear like phantoms gliding casually through the walls. The bombast is of a glam, glitter bazooka kind, not of kneeling, embittered torch songs scrabbling for pity or worthy head-nodding.
‘The Smut Peddler’ is an unassuming gem, an instrumental that screams of 60s and 70s gritty British crime dramas, warm pints, glistening cobbled streets and brown paper bags. In contrast, ‘Denim Eyes’ sees Mud floating in Elton John‘s slipstream, creeping stealthily towards a chorus which has that fabled quality of threatening to never end. In fact, a dog barking in the studio breaks the spell only to present you with some George Harrison-like guitar shamanism that is equally entrancing. ‘Spook Racket’ goes full-on Sweet with hand-claps and drum stomps and then bats you around the head when you aren’t looking with serial killer Hammond stabs and some growling guitar from Rosco Wilson. Somehow, by the end of the track, we’re fading out to Spanish guitar – it’s a key track on the album and a real tour de force.
‘Stepped Out of Time’ returns to a Bond-like theme, with both knee and tear-jerking minor chords and Cunningham demonstrating that she knows when and where to use her full-powered vocals and, as here, when to use it as a counterpoint to some excellent keyboard work. The album concludes with ‘The Premiere’, a similarly dramatic ending as the opener proved, it leaves you tantalisingly on the edge of a cliff (though if you buy the CD, you get two bonus tracks – ‘Return of the Ellington’ and ‘Home’. A stellar album but one which ultimately offers no clues as to how her future releases will sound, which is just as it should be.
Daz Lawrence
Buy Rosalie Cunningham’s ‘To Shoot Another Day’ here
…but buy everything else here too https://rosaliecunningham.com/
