Martha Wainwright - Goodnight City

The Guardian 80

(PIAS)

Martha Wainwright’s first three albums run the gamut from intense confessionals and tasteful torch songs to electropop. Here, she paints from an even wider musical palette on a single album, experimenting with everything from lush, synth-and-saxophone pop to Patti Smith-type punk. Unusually, half the songs are penned by (or are collaborations with) friends and relatives, but Wainwright treats every one as if it were her own. Vocal gymnastics are used to convey emotion, rather than for effect, and as a result, stylistically very different songs from the likes of Beth Orton and Tune-Yards hang together perfectly. Look Into My Eyes (co-written with her aunt, Anna McGarrigle) and Francis (by brother Rufus) are sublime, but any concern that the number of writers involved is because of creative block is dispelled by the strength of Wainwright’s own compositions. Window and Traveller are upliftingly powerful. Superb country opener Around the Bend finds her convincingly adopting the persona of a drug-addled lover, while Franci gloriously turns adorational love into surging, epic pop.

Thu Nov 10 21:30:01 GMT 2016

The Guardian 80

(Pias)

In many people’s minds, Martha Wainwright remains the confessional singer-songwriter who castigated her folk icon dad on her eponymous debut. But she’s tried plenty of other musical personas since, and her sixth studio album shows her versatility at its best, its songs not so much genre experiments as joyful costume changes. Wainwright moonlights variously as folksy singer-songwriter (Traveller), jazz crooner (Before the Children Came Along) and electropop chanteuse (Look Into My Eyes), and remains a deft interpreter of other people’s songs. Of the handful included here, the best are Tune-Yards’s sinuously funky Take the Reins and Francis by her brother Rufus, the kind of swooning chamber pop he used to write for himself.

Sun Nov 20 08:00:32 GMT 2016