Album Review: Cathy Davey - The Nameless

Having racked up comparisons to just about every flighty-voiced female singer, from Joni Mitchell to Bjork, not to mention a Choice Music Prize nomination and Meteor Music Award for her roundly-applauded second album, Tales Of Silversleeve, Cathy Davey's new offering, The Nameless, is another sure-footed step towards establishing her own distinctive style. The Dubliner achieves this by covering a lot of musical ground and putting her own twist on a multitude of styles. Take the Russian dance feel to the title-track opener, which, with just the odd shiver of tambourine and a military drum roll, sets a brooding atmosphere, one that lifts and descends a number of times over the course of the album. ‘Army of Tears’ is a taut and suspenseful tango that puts a brave face on for what is actually a broken-hearted lament for love lost. Throw in the stripped-down jazz of ‘Bad Weather’, and her credentials as a first class alchemist of diverse musical genres are secured.

Where Davey really works her charm, though, is on the coy nursery-rhyme songs like ‘Dog’, where she exhibits again her love of lupine choruses cooed in long, slender vowels, all light and airy but with enough shuck and jive to the rhythm to prevent things from floating off into the ether entirely. One of her most delectable charms is the way she succeeds in rendering adulterated subjects in a disarming little girl voice. A recurring characteristic on her first two albums, this is very much in evidence again here; a case in point is ‘Wild Rum’, a tipsy showdown with a bottle of booze that strikes a sweet chord between vulnerability and boldness. 

Besides all this, Davey has the market more or less cornered when it comes to fifties ballroom kitsch – or, to name check a track from her last album, overblown love songs. ‘Universal Tipping’ and ‘End of The End’ are prime examples of this, awash as they are with lilting melodies and swooning harmonies. But the highest of many high points on The Nameless has to be ‘Little Red’, which reels the listener in with another candy-coated hook in the jaw, just as irresistibly as ‘Reuben’ did on …Silversleeve. 

All told then, album number three is an inebriating mix of yearning and romance that should leave the cherub-voiced chanteuse in line for more nominations and awards in twenty-ten.