| ASTRID WILLIAMSON | ||||
ASTRID
WILLIAMSON – DAY OF THE LONE WOLF.
Imagine a place where the stimulating strangeness of Radiohead might meet the melodic sensuality of Suzanne Vega, where the soul-bearing intensity of a cult singer-songwriter like Lisa Germano might melt into the funky ambiences conjured up by Daniel Lanois, and where the minimalist keyboard backwash of Erik Satie might drift across the surreal landscapes of Laura Veirs. Well, until now, such places existed only in dreams as if waiting to be born but Astrid Williamson’s third solo album, Day Of The Lone Wolf is just such a place - a place where all these magical sounds (and more besides) have finally come together, to rub one up against the other, to collide and spark brightly, illuminating the darker corners of the human heart. Shetland-born Williamson started to dream of a career as a musician when she was just eleven, having played the piano, guitar and fiddle since early childhood. She continued on the classical music path and gained a music degree from the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow, while putting together the band that would become the critically acclaimed Goya Dress in the mid-1990s. Goya Dress made just one album for Nude Records, the John Cale-produced Rooms in 1996. “I loved being in Goya Dress,” Williamson says, “and the media were mostly very kind to us, but the big sales never really kicked in.” Scandalously, in 1998, although critically-acclaimed, the record-buying public were similarly unmoved by Williamson’s solo debut, Boy For You, a record that kicked off with the memorable refrain, ‘Cocaine and chocolate won’t keep you alive/But it might fill you up if you feel deprived.” Boy For You also came out on Nude and was produced by Malcolm Burn in New Orleans. The true merits of any artist destined for greater things are invariably revealed in times of adversity and that was certainly the case with Williamson. “There’s a before-and-after aspect to my career,” she acknowledges. “After the crash, when my deal with Nude ended, everything fell apart and I didn’t really know where I was going. There was lots of staring at the sea until I got my confidence back.” Williamson rebuilt her career from the ground up, launching her own record label, Incarnation, and releasing her second album, the self-financed Astrid in 2003. Astrid gathered many plaudits in its wake – including a four star Q review that hinted at both its “timeless” and “stunning” content - but its really only on its successor, Day Of The Lone Wolf, the record you now have in your hands, that Williamson has finally come into her own. And even if Williamson suggests that “if it turns out to be the last album I ever record, I will not regret anything about it” we suspect she is merely being disingenuous as well as brutally honest. Which is what you’d expect from someone who’s spent her whole life threatening to make just such a record. As recently as last November, after a Williamson live show, Julie Burchill commented that “I was expecting a sort of quiet in-the-library version of Kate Bush but instead it was like Johnny Cash and Brigitte Bardot had had a baby and stuck a guitar in its mitt” and, indeed, there’s hardly anything “folk-tinged” about her. Apart from its intimacy, Day Of The Lone Wolf is also a thoroughly modern record: on opening track Siamese, Williamson evocatively intones ‘I text I still love you but without the smile/And you go shhh, you go shhh, you only go shhh/You and me are Siamese’ and you know exactly what she means even before she reveals that ‘my computer finds you/ Computers can find anything and my favourites’; on the single Superman 2 (Superman itself appeared on Astrid), she is drinking ‘champagne Bellinis just to think about you’ and looking at bridges longer when they’re ‘blue, blue blue’; and on Another Twisted Thing, we encounter the 21st Century beat poetry of Williamson singing ‘it was amazing alright felt just like a rainbow coming out at night/ It was amazing alright/ Out of sight/ Is hope the eternal spring?/ Or is hope just another twisted thing?’ At other times Day Of The Lone Wolf is just plain sexy: True Romance contains the couplet ‘Look at me and think of this/All my tangled hair across your hips’, the ambiguously asexual Amaryllis could easily end in tears, and both Tonight (‘I’m gonna find someone who’s a lot like me/And get the things I say’) and Reach (‘Maybe I’ll bring you back home’) reveal Williamson to be a predatory lover. And as she says: “There is more of me on this album than anything I’ve ever done before.” Astrid Williamson releases Day of The Lone Wolf on One Little Indian on May 1st. The single, Superman 2 backed with Astrid’s amazing version of Snow Patrol’s Run and the sublime Even If You Killed Me will be released as a CD single on May 15th. Astrid will be headlining the Borderline with a full backing band on Thursday 13th April 2006. Phill
Savidge 0208 348 0373/07887 584 242 |
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