Album: Thea Gilmore, Murphy's Heart (Fullfill)
Friday 03 September 2010
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Few songwriters are blessed with Thea Gilmore's ability to coin the kind of memorable couplets that crystallise characters in a well-chosen phrase.
On her 10th album, she even does it to herself. "I'm an architect of sorrow, a girl in minor-key disguise," she claims in "Coffee and Roses". She's very adept at romantic metaphors, which is handy, even when they contradict: "Love is either wild frontiers, or automatic blue", she offers in "Automatic Blue", moments after concluding in the previous song that "love's the greatest instrument of rage". On "Murphy's Heart", she runs the gamut of attitudes, from bitter and derisory to sensitively simpatico – the differences subtly signalled in the folk-rock arrangements, where wistful fiddle and harmonium drones, delicate cello and mandolin interplay, and thrumming percussion relay the basic emotional momentum.
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