gemma hayes: let it break

Sporadically releasing records without much fanfare since her highly praised 2002 debut Night On My Side scooped a Mercury Prize nomination, Ireland’s Gemma Hayes has carved out a modest career very much on her own terms. When her glossy second record The Roads Don’t Love You, recorded in LA with producer Joey Waronker (Beck, REM), failed to take her to the next level of commercial success that many had predicted, she took to her own path and has resolutely stuck to it. With her fourth album, Let It Break, she’s taken the logical step of self-releasing on her own imprint after several years on small, independent labels. Reuniting with producer David Odlum, who worked on 2008′s well-received The Hollow Of Morning, Hayes has tinkered little with the formula of last time around. The sound is pristine, layered and sympathetic to her warm, soft voice, which weaves in and out of its upper register with ease. Reverb-laden guitars and unassuming electronics abound, but at its heart this is an acoustic singer-songwriter album given something of a studio sheen.

Among the intimate acoustic ballads are scattered several folk-pop numbers with rather more bite, and it’s these songs that impress the most. Lead single ‘Shock To My System’ is an immediate standout; shimmering and gentle but with a strong chorus melody, the subtle instrumentation gives Hayes’s voice the space to stretch and charm. The opposite is true with ‘Keep Running’, which boasts a far busier mix, but the result is no less effective. Road tested under the working title ‘Tokyo’, the song marries a simple strummed acoustic riff with percussion, breathy backing vocals and, crucially, one of Hayes’s most robust and memorable melodies in years. A number of other songs impress for various reasons: opener ‘Don’t Let Them Cut Your Hair’ is drenched in atmospheric reverb, giving Hayes’s vocals a Liz Fraser-like quality, while the jaunty piano work of ‘All I Need’, added to its unusual chorus, makes for one of the album’s more surprising detours. The piano-centric quality is reprised in the moving instrumental ‘That Sky Again’, which segues neatly into the lovely but overlong ‘There’s Only Love’.

A pair of more experimental songs also leap out – ‘Fire’ interpolates a piano-based section with a skeletal drum machine-led track, while the urgent, somewhat sinister ‘Ruin’ makes the album’s best use of synths – but the rest of the material, while uniformly pretty, is far less essential. ‘Brittle Winter’ adds some black humour to the mix (“The water’s bloody freezing”), but it can’t disguise what is an inherently weak melody, while the sleepy ‘To Be Beside You’ languishes in tedium. ‘Sorrow Be Gone’, too, is a much quieter number, with a naked, close-mic’d vocal, but lacks distinction – a similar complaint can be levelled at album closer ‘Noise’. The amount of disappointingly ordinary, ineffectual songs on Let It Break works against the album as a whole, but alternately punchy and pretty songs like ‘Keep Running’ and ‘Shock To My System’, and the more ambitious leanings of ‘Fire’ and ‘Ruin’, are proof that Hayes can still produce the goods.

[GHM; May 30, 2011]

Written by: Matt Barton

Tags: gemma hayes, let it break

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 12:15 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.