GENEVIEVE CHADWICK - BEST LEFT FOR THE WILLING: REVIEW

GENEVIEVE CHADWICK

Best Left For The Willing (Red Rebel Music/MGM)

Some people sound preternaturally lived: grizzled and roughened, aged by experience as much as actual years. It’s a handy thing. When you get someone young sounding like this, it can blow you away (God, she sounds like a 50-year-old Alabama woman who has been doing this since the last days of Stax) or it can seduce you (jeez, he must have been hurt and rebuilt a few times on the back of pain), while distracting you from some home truths.

Namely, they haven’t really done any of those things or understand the life mechanics underpinning real insights; they just have the sound and the expressive veneer. Sure, that can work for a while, but the façade eventually peels away and the empty interior just disappoints.

That’s not gonna happen here. Genevieve Chadwick, arriving with her third album a decade after its predecessor, boasting a voice that can power through its upper register showing only a thin scraping, and bend its mid-range without having to get guttural, is past being some ingénue here for distraction.

There’s something about the reach-and-hold of Ready And Able, a coastal blues which in its last minute or so sheds whatever easiness there is in its rhythm for something closer to pressing need, that pulls up an emotional verity. Chadwick begins the song over acoustic guitar strumming with a suggestion of bruising in her tone, so when she asks “want to come down on a Sunday night, fuck me up anyway you like?”, there is enough ambiguity to leave open the question of who might be in control here.

Even when that question is seemingly settled, when she declares that she is not ready and able for what’s going to come of this, that this is beyond her, there’s enough daylight between declaration and action – between the rasp and the yearning in her voice, between the push forward of the electric guitar and the hesitation in the drums – to remind us of the weakness of any supposed strength.

Who knows what’s right, or what’s going to be right in five minutes? Your gut knows as much as your head – and that is not much at all. We’re all guessing here people.

Another way to get this message is in the contrasting elements from the opening of Wanting More, where a guitar bending in a dusty night gives way to a bedroom chords, where a conciliatory note in her voice hardens, where the idea of wanting more moves from reasonable to an imposition, and then to regret that must be left behind.

There are interesting moves aplenty that speak of the experience behind these songs and this life. The coating over a measured ballad that gives us Blood, Sweat, Tears might normally tip it into something soulful, which would not be a bad thing, and certainly would make sense. But Chadwick and band do something a little less predictable, maybe even smarter, leaning back and riding this as a country song that takes its steps with less weight but no less emotion.

A similar slide away from the straight happens in the opening Wildfire, a song that seems inevitably to be heading to a blues shape – ache, chugging moves and slow burn as the foundations – but the guitar folds itself back into the song, Chadwick doesn’t loosen control, and the climb to the climax is anything but steep. Before we know it, the song has surrounded us, without leaving any visible signs of pressure.

I don’t know why it’s taken Chadwick ten years between albums but I can say it shows. And that’s a good thing.

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