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The Kirsty MacColl web site
INTERVIEW
This is a review of Tropical Brainstorm
Extracted from review by Ben Varkentine, PopMatters Film and Music Critic
Full copy at Popmatters.com
There's a quality to MacColl's songwriting that is at once the teenage nymphet she once was (and I've got the picture of her in leather pants, circa 1980, to prove it) and the divorced mother in her early 40s that she now is. The reason, most likely, is that there were suggestions of the divorced woman in the nymphet, and the divorced woman remembers what being the nymphet was like. In These Shoes? is full of the sound of a girl just beginning to imagine the extent of her power, a time when dressing is not to kill but to pin down.
Yet it's also got the sensibility of the older woman who doesn't need exotic locations, adventure or kink for her sex, the act itself is lovely enough, thank you, and you'll deliver it right now if you know what's good for you. The gem of the album is Wrong Again. Starting with a contemporary dance/pop drum program, which hits a wall and the song is quickly transformed by one of the most vulnerable vocals MacColl has ever sung, and Pete Glenister's soft yet sharp guitar.
Throughout, there is a subtle interplay between these elements and Lee Groves' samples that come up from the well time and time again. Like the shudders of someone who knows they will start crying if they let their mind linger too long on their burden. So they shoulder it and keep telling you their story, but you know they keep sneaking peeks.
And there is, of course, That Voice. Kirsty groupies like myself have come to want our fixes of it, especially in those ecstatic moments where she acts as her own background singer, multi-tracking her unearthly voice and stacking harmony upon harmony till she's the Beach Girls all by herself. Others have tried, most recently Judith Boyle of Adventures in Stereo, but I have to go back to Marvin Gaye to think of another artist whose vocals are such wonders of invention. Autumngirlsoup and Alegria are particularly sly, smooth examples here — but when one buys a Kirsty album, one prepares for a weekend's worth of that sort of thing, and one is rarely disappointed.
Kirsty should go into the studio with Pet Shop Boys or Massive Attack and make a dance/pop/trip-hop collection of period songs (she's already recorded two Cole Porter songs with the Pogues for the Red Hot and Blue AIDS charity record). Or she should go all the other way and make the album with a chamber group, perhaps a string quartet joined by Glenister's (who also co-produced Tropical Brainstorm with MacColl and drummer Dave Ruffy) guitar. But it's an album she should make.
And wonderful smart-ass that she is, if she reads this, she'll probably make the next record heavy metal, just to spite me.
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