Album: Tracy Bonham, Masts of Manhatta (Lojinx)

3.00

Reviewed by Andy Gill

Friday 16 July 2010

Her first album in five years finds Tracy Bonham mostly reflecting on female rites of passage in songs like "In the Moonlight" and "Josephine" – the former featuring two girls out for the evening, the latter expressing the emptiness left behind when one runs off with a carnival worker.

The most assured is "Your Night Is Wide Open", in which cello and fingerstyle guitar backdrop idealised recollections, before brusque drums usher in a harder kernel of truth. But the standout track is surely "Devil's Got Your Boyfriend", an account of two-timing in which the sinuous, swaying Tom Waits-ian groove is laced with Bonham's elegant violin line and veneered with the 1940s charm of her harmonies, a brilliant blend of contrasting emotional pulls.

DOWNLOAD THIS Devil's Got Your Boyfriend; Your Night Is Wide Open; Josephine

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