rockfeedback
Debut album “Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose” introduces one of the most self-assured new artists of the year, a pop polymath whose blend of psychedelia, glam rock and chain gang folk is quite unlike anything else you’re likely to hear in 2012. Like her utterly unique stage outfits, it’s made from disparate individual elements that wouldn’t work on paper, but sing out like a holy choir in the execution.
On Atlas, a pounding drum beat and twanging guitars give way to soaring vocals and even a freaky spoken word bit, it is entirely typical of an album that’s anything but typical. Having spoken about wanting her music to sound like she’s marching to war, the album presents her as a psychedelic Boudica, rousing the troops with near-operatic vocals one minute and counting the dead in moments of smoky-voiced melancholia the next.
Adding muscle to Beth’s far-ranging vocals are her band The Hooves Of Destiny. Comprising Dav Shiel (drums, vocals samples) Rory Gibson (bass, vocals), Ed Blazey (guitar, trumpet, vocals) and Findlay Macaskill (violin, vocals), they’re a crack unit recruited from Beth’s native North East. Songs about boys and dreams have never sounded so forceful and proud as these, and there’s plenty more to unpick in Beth’s hugely inventive lyrics.
