Thursday 14 August 2008

Jenny Lindfors, When The Night Time Comes

Irish creative person Jenny Lindfors is the latest hopeful debutant to join the large and growing concourse of slightly retro, more often than not acoustic isaac M. Singer songwriters clamoring for your attention. The competition is tough out there. When The Night Time Comes could be described as a romanticistic song cycle � whether it's all about one relationship or several � beginning and ending as it does with songs themed about desire and lust, and getting dark and emotionally messy in the middle. Hardly a fresh topic, but the tale is in the telling, so is she up to it?



She's sure blessed with a smashing, bluesy vocalisation and knows how to use it, coming across a bit like Bonnie Raitt or Susan Tedeschi on the confident opener Night Time, which, wish several other tracks has an ever-so-slightly 'ethnic' vibration courtesy of James Guilmartin's djembe drum. There's a distinctly CSNY flavour to the vocal harmonies on Voodoo, and definite dark glasses of Joni Mitchell on the ballads I Don't Really Want You Here and By The Wayside, while Sheryl Crow may have been the role model on the more upbeat Time Warp and Play It Away.



Lindfors plays guitar, banjo, ukulele and percussion and even does her own backing vocals at times as well as producing and penning all the material. Whether that was down to the constraints of the budget or an outsized ego, there's a little too much of Jenny and non enough of other masses on this overly autobiographical effort. It sags a third of the direction in with the schmaltzy cello and awkward lyrics of Lovestage, and things get worse with Looming, which suffers similar problems.



Lindfors is at her best on the more rocking tracks when the focus is more on her voice than what she's saying. By the time her 40 minutes ar up, you may be wishing she'd either branch out her issue matter or try singing someone else's songs � the corporeal isn't impregnable enough to engage end-to-end � and perhaps bring forth someone else in to produce.




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