The Lancashire-based Palmer has a delicious hair-in-the-voice approach that gives her a tough edge over more fey contemporaries. This, her third album after 2001’s self-funded romantica obscura and predecessor A Certain Kind Of Distance, is mostly just acoustic and voice, sparsely adorned with the decorative frills of guitarist Mark Townson, fretless bass, violin, mandolin and cello (the slow string fade of “Followed Down Sundown” is outstanding). We’re in Joni Mitchell/Shawn Colvin territory here?pin-drop ballads with the faintest country-blues undertow-but, as on “Fishtails”, she can pout like the sassiest of bar-room queens, too Impressive.
Advertisement