Kirsty Almeida – Moonbird
All Made Up Records – 2 February 2020
This is Kirsty Almeida’s first release in six years after taking time out from music-making following the birth of her son and to allow time to recover from PTSD and post-natal depression. It is, she says, a representation of “the real me; the warrior, the artist, the wizard, the girl, the broken, the found and the re-birthed”. And if that all sounds a bit overwhelming, then the fact that she rhymes piano and hammers on the track Josie Brown should be enough to warrant anyone’s attention.
Whether autobiographical or not, the track in question, produced by veteran folk record producer Bill Leader and accompanied by a simple acoustic guitar, is a finely spun, softly sung Janis Ian-styled five-minute account of an elderly childhood piano tutor whom the narrator would visit each week, taking with them a tipple of alcohol, until one day, getting to no reply, broke in to find her dead on the floor.
It’s a first-class example of Almeida’s songwriting skills and her ability to weave narrative stories and more customary ‘song’ lyrics. Working with an array of musicians that includes co-producer Matt Owens on bass and John Ellis on piano, along with strings, brass, flute, kora, lap steel and herself on parlor guitars (a small-bodied guitar), it opens with rolling rhythm of The Fire, a country-shaded song about a relationship in which once “the tiniest spark/Would light my whole heart” but has now gone cold even though she’s “tried every triable fuse”. Moving to piano and caressed by strings, Dance With Me (the video for which premiered on Folk Radio here) trips nimbly across the ballroom floor under starlit skies into the night and until life fades in a light but heady romantic reverie, the sentiments echoing Cohen’s Dance Me To The End of Love ending in an exultant declaration that “I am truth/I am light/I am joy/And all I need is in me”.
Romance radiates throughout. On the pizzicato waltzing You Make My Heart, a dreamy co-write with Owens, she declares “You make my heart start beating…reaching… praying…laughing” and that “Faith in love is all I have” as the strings sweep it up into a soundtrack from some Paris-set 50s musical, while, back in autumnal London, built upon swooning strings and puttering drums, The Stranger (“if you’ve got time to listen to my heartbreak show/Well, I’ve got time to say it all again”) conjures the 60s musical world of Vikki Carr and the like.
Clocking in at just over seven minutes and trilling birdcalls, the 5/4 signature title track is a warm, intoxicating bossa nova shuffle asking for the night and the right mood to bring her lover back, musical contrasts coming with the kora-accompanied self-worth themed, high-pitched vocal ripples of Into The Light (“I love me enough/To step into the light”) and, more rumbustiously, the goodtime New Orleans of I’m Going To Love You and its backing vocals bolstered swaggering title line chorus.
It ends on almost hymnal notes, wordless vocals and strings accompanying the two-minute instrumental Ode To A Parlor Guitar, a gorgeous coda to a gorgeous album immersed in a warm suffusion of light and positivity. Breathe deep.
https://www.kirstyalmeida.co.uk/