Hannah Rose Platt – Letters Under Floorboards
Continental Records – 25 October 2019
Liverpool-bred and Lonon-based, Hannah Rose Platt follows up her well-received debut, Portraits, with a second set of variously musically lively and more reflective Americana-veined songs, often adopting a story approach and frequently with a personal background, this time featuring vocals from Sid Griffin and Danny George Wilson, with the latter’s colleague, Henry Senior, on pedal steel and string arrangements by Joe Bennett.
It opens with Illuminate, an uptempo rocking number about using past mistakes to light the way ahead rather than dwelling on them, one of the few uplifting tracks, which otherwise largely address the darker side of life and love. The first of the narratives, Platt on guitars, and violin with Thomas Collinson providing bass, drums and lap steel, comes with Chanel & Cigarettes in which a spectral femme fatale lurks in bars waiting to allure adulterers and give them a ghostly wake-up call. Elsewhere, accompanied by guitar, fiddle, accordion and penny whistle, Brooklyn, New York takes the form of letters from an Irish construction worker to his parted lover and the realisation he’ll never earn enough to return, its slow pace building to a climax.
That’s followed by the jogging tempo of When Audrey Came To Call, an account of Hurricane Audrey, one of the deadliest tropical cyclones in U.S. history, which, in June 1957, swept across the South and caused the death of 500 people, here dressed up in the imagery of a tempestuous relationship. A similar narrative forms the sparse fingerpicked, effects-laced I Will Tell You When. With Griffin duetting on vocals, it’s framed as a father-daughter story back in the old west with the former trying to allay the latter’s fears as the sky grows dark and the air is full of noise, the song’s second half revealing the devastation wreaked by the locust swarms that swept across the Great Plains in the 1870s.
Bennett providing trumpet with Larry Kenny on accordion, she turns to history for the mid-tempo strum of the brightly sung Josephine, a tribute to the American-born French entertainer, Josephine Baker who, while probably best remembered as a dancer at the Folies Bergère in Paris, was also an activist who worked with the French Resistance during WWII and, having worked with the Civil Rights Movement alongside Martin Luther King, was offered the unofficial leadership after his assassination, turning down out of concern for her children.
Earlier in the album, the strummed waltz-time Sculptor uses the image of the artist chipping way as a metaphor for an abusive controlling relationship and, more generally, the oppression of women by men, a theme that’s revisited with strident guitars and Southern drawl on Black Smoke about how men see a friendly smile as a come-on (“can’t you read the unease on my face/As you slide another uninvited arm/’round my waist…A prude, a whore, fair game/Which label will you give me?As I shrug you away?”) and then trash reputations when they don’t get their way.
Likewise, both the acoustic strummed Your Way (“You are the balloon and I am the child holding on to your string”) and the pedal steel coloured Checkmate (“I swear this will be the last time I play this game with you”) deal with being caught in a dysfunctional, controlling relationship, afraid to break free in the former but finally realising here’s nothing left to lose.
It ends on a further downbeat note with To Love You about the wreckage of trying to keep a relationship together when it’s broken beyond repair, the song about finding self-worth, of staring into the mirror, facing the truths (“the harsh light reveals /All the marks we’ve concealed”) and realising that “you deserve someone to love you”. Open the box, take out her letters, read them and weep.