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Album: Lucy Rose, Like I Used To (Columbia)

 

Andy Gill
Friday 21 September 2012 15:01 BST
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Hotly tipped as a leading light of the next wave of British nu-folk, Lucy Rose is charming, pretty, mellifluous and frankly rather insipid.

Songs like "Shiver", with its sleek lap-steel arrangement, slip down without touching the sides, but the spiky astringency once such a vital component of proper folk music has been diluted to almost homeopathic negligibility.

Instead, tracks such as "Be Alright", "Watch Over" and "Don't You Worry" invest the genre with the nebulous feelgood sentiments of Coldplay. Indeed, so utterly wet are the apprehensions of love in her Laura Marling-lite compositions that it comes as a huge shock when she refers to someone "not fazed by the darkness in her soul". By contrast, Lucy's world seems illumined by a thousand watts of happiness.

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