Lisa Mitchell was an artist whose name I’d heard a lot of before I decided to listen to her work. With an ARIA nomination under her wing, I found myself drawn to listening to Wonder after seeing her impressive performance of Coin Laundry at the awards ceremony.
Wonder opens with a short forty six second taster of Mitchell’s voice. Singing the classic Oh What a Beautiful Morning you are introduced to the rawness of her vocals. Her voice sounds cute, edgy and youthful; the latter is due to the fact that Mitchell herself is only just out of her youth.
Next you are given the opportunity to enjoy Neopolitan Dreams. With a voice that reminds me of Kimya Dawson, Mitchell uses what sounds like a glockenspiel to create a catchy beat to lay the vocals on top of. Having seen live performances of this song on YouTube, it appears that Mitchell gets caught up in her own little world as she strums her guitar and jumps, like an over excited toddler, around the stage.
“Even though you’re poison babe, I wouldn’t even hesitate” are lyrics from So Jealous which approaches the regularly sung about topic of a fledgling relationship. She sings of being “So sick” with love. Whilst some lyrics aren’t the most original, Mitchell matches them with her edgy voice and musical abilities to produce something quite special.
A favourite of mine, Coin Laundry, is Mitchell’s most well-known track. Having gained enough recognition to earn her a nomination for Best Female at 2009’s ARIA’s, the song received significant airplay in her home country of Australia and has a lovely video to accompany it. The video is, unsurprisingly, set in a laundrette with Mitchell playing a character who is invisible to others.
Clean White Love, Pirouette and Love Letter all demonstrate the versatility of Mitchell’s voice with varying tempos. Whilst Oh! Hark! impresses you with some soft vocals combined with a louder, faster chorus.
Stevie is a reasonably long track, approaching five minutes in length. However I feel it’s a great length for this song. Ok, so there is a lot of repetition of “Oh Stevie, why can’t you see you’re God to me?” but it just works. There are slower instrumentals breaking up the verses, breaking up the repetitive chorus.
The rest of the album follows suit with songs that are as you’d expect. It’s not that I’m not impressed by them, I just feel that they are very much “album tracks” that aren’t quite up to the standard of being single material
Whilst it’s not an album track, I want to mention Alice In Wonderland as a lovely song that I would recommend for you to listen to. I’ve got tickets to see Lisa Mitchell perform in Cambridge on March 4th. She’s got a lot of dates around the country, so if you’re a fan of Kimya Dawson or generally a fan of my obscure Australian recommendations then I think she’s worthy of you parting with your money to see.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment