Hannah White‘s 2022 album About Time earned a Song Of The Year for Car Crash at the 2023 Americana Music Association UK awards. Sweet Revolution marks her return on a new label but still navigating her Americana noir. The album was produced by Michele Stodart, who also plays bass alongside backing from husband Keiron Marshall on guitars. It opens with the bluesy, rumbling Hail The Fighter, which, as the title suggests, raises a toast to all those who stand up against adversity. The first of three tracks to feature Basia Bartz on violins, Ordinary Woman, with its baritone guitar, follows with a gentler rhythm, her voice soaring in 60s balladry style on a song about growing older (“This tired old dress, was so beautiful new/And the first time I wore it I was beautiful too/It feels like such a long time ago when the years were my friend/And it felt like the seasons would never come to an end”) but while it might initially seem defeatist (“There’s no gloss no shine to me/hat you get is what you see/I am nothing special/No head will turn my way/And I’d understand if you find a better place to stay”) it’s actually a celebration of being who you are (“I’m an ordinary woman, and I’m not sure if that’s enough/But if it is I’ll give you all my love”).
Again with violin, the percussive-driven Chains Of Ours also features vocals from Daisy Chute on what plays very much like an early Fleetwood Mac number, both musically and in its darker approach to love “a game as old as lovers” (“Like the hold of a firm embrace/The feeling of a hand against my face/Under thumb; I’m the one/Seems these chains of ours will never be undone/Fighting talk from a time long gone with words that make absurd my wrong/And another door closed on me”).
With Chute and Bartz again present, White adds dulcimer and didgeridoo to her bow to bring a sinewy mood to One Foot, the echoey, muted percussion reflecting the lines about “Heartbeat beating, skin sting heating/Senses pounding, murmurating/Sounds from the outside reverberating inside” on a song about taking gradual steps to move forward, that almost seems like about being born as much as just awakening.
Holly Carter brings her pedal steel to the party for the pulsing, hypnotic sonic ebb and flow of One Night Stand, which weaves a musical cocktail of psychedelic Velvets and shoegaze reverb fuzz on a song that again takes a downbeat, resigned perspective on being nothing special making your way through the disappointments of life (“There’s a feeling in my stomach yet nothing has begun… I’ve been walking this walk my whole life and it’s taken all I have to say/I’ll walk the bleak tomorrow like I’m walking it today/With my hands inside my pockets for respite from the trials of screwed-up and ruined souls reminding me I’m next in queue”)
BRIT Award nominee Beth Rowley on harmonica with Emma Holbrook’s driving drums and Lars Hammersland’s blues organ, The Aftershow is at least more musically upbeat, White’s voice taking on a Southern bluesy sass on another shit show life, the narrator mirroring her mother’s mistakes (“Met a man fell in love, party over/Had a baby way too young/What a man he was older than me/He had a swagger & a worldly sense/Took me home, gave me all he had/I lost more than my innocence”), eventually hitching her star to a musician because “It was the music or a living hell”.
The pace and the mood fall back for the piano, rippling circling guitar notes of River Run, a song about a connection between lost souls (“All alone and stopping in a bar for a few/Is not a normal thing for a woman to do/But I am settled for the evening/There’s a man in the corner all melancholy/He doesn’t even speak the same language as me/But I know he knows what I’m feeling/Cos I’m so worn out/And I’m full of doubt/I’m drunk without a plan”), dreams again turned to dust (“Holding out for work since the babies were born/But the years roll by like a fast flowing river/Knowing rivers run dry don’t make me clever/There’s my setting sun”), looking for anything to numb the empty pain (“Trading my life story for whatever you got/ I do that when I’m lonely/Craving attention like a child so sore/I don’t even know what I’m craving it for…Holding on to hope til my hands are blood bare”), ending with the crushing line “I can’t fight when I’m the only one at war”.
Bartz adding cello to her violin parts, Right On Time is a 60s pop ballad throwback, though here, written about Marshall coming into her life, while “So close to giving up”, rescue is on hand with “a touch that’s so tender/Loving words help me remember… Only just a breath ago, I’d never believe/Love could be a place to go for a damaged heart like me”.
Pedal steel puts in a second appearance on the folksy Americana of Rosa, a simple song of not becoming a victim to your fears (“You hide away/When you’re living like prey/But out of nothing comes nothing at all”) and steadfastness (“All those fires/Never left us paralysed/We’ll keep on burning and screaming to fools/We may never be victorious, we’re not dumb to that/It won’t matter to the two of us, here is where we’re at”).
Sounding like a bluesy Dolly Parton, Clementine spins a funky, swampy rhythm around its narrative of self-pride and defiance (“Head held high walking down our street I couldn’t help but stare/Something about the shoes on her feet or the colour of her hair”) embodied in the titular self-possessed dancer (“Every eye was on her as she moved across the floor/Not a man could come near her, it’s not what Clementine was for”) and her feminist mission statement that “Being all woman in a man’s world is an act of revolution”.
For the final track, the slow-burning, almost Celtic country hymnal, A Separation, White is joined on duetting vocals and piano by Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, a long-standing champion of her music, for a bittersweet song of a relationship that’s grown apart and of the bruised devotion and resignation it brings, the ache swelling in the lines “You’re beside me and I’m sorry/For the sorrow that is showing in your eyes/And for the questions you won’t ask me…If silence could save us, we’d be home and dry/Darling put my hand in yours, I will close all doors/If you keep me safe tonight/And I’ll tell myself how I can’t leave you now”, ending with the heartrending “There’s a distance between us/Even when you smile you wear a frown/ resentment that’s grown and grown/Now all the strength you have can’t keep it down/I’d rest my head upon your shoulders baby, but I don’t have it in me”.
The honesty in Hannah’s words, music, and voice makes all the hurt within somehow beatific. White says music “got me through some of the darkest times and I don’t know what I’d be doing without it. I feel so strongly that if everybody had that opportunity, so many people’s lives could be transformed.” This superb album might well do just that.
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