GRACE CUMMINGS – BLOODHORSE!: REVIEW

22 minutes ago
3 min read

GRACE CUMMINGS

Bloodhorse! (Sugar Mountains Records)

SOMETHING WICKEDLY SMART this way comes, a counter note more than antidote to those who had parked Grace Cummings and her astonishing, deep and ridged voice in the car yard of the very bruised and slowly-revealing-all-that-hurt artists. Assuming she was the kind of singer who breathes in intimacy and breathes out drama. The kind of songwriter who packs things tightly around the core and makes even big issues intensely close.

Which is not to say those assumptions are without merit, for Cummings can and has done all those things, and they’re not absent from this new album. The 95 seconds of Paradise spools out like the remnants of tape from something laid down and left to drift away, a long breath of farewell with Cummings almost muffled against the clearer piano.

But Bloodhorse! – and that exclamation mark is relevant here – is a beast of the kinetic, volatility apparent in every decision she made with co-producer Jonathan Wilson. Energy flows in and expands, arrangements don’t shy from pushing at the edges of overflow, sometimes even to the point of excess (though it turns out not to be excessive at all) and genuine movement is encouraged in a listener.

Aggressive use of strings and intimations of discordance, vocally and instrumentally, in The Hills Are Alive with the Sound Of Morphine (credited to Cummings and two older chaps, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) sets the tone for the album from the start. Mixing Brian Wilson with Kate Bush grand gestures, a George Martin-esque flourish and breakdown with Patti Smith declarations, the song veers out of its lane so regularly that you’re best just accepting that this is the route you’re taking, and you should forget all road markings.

https://youtu.be/nQ7zDW0EB5Q?si=NrkrUqsjNKN4Mm3J

Some of this feel returns much later in the album in Witch! Witch! Witch (those exclamation marks again) which opens like a wall of sound ballad with Shirley Bassey rather than, say, The Ronettes, but finds its real home in a semi-glazed ‘70s psychedelia that warps bits of country rock, choral rock and West Village bar scenes together. And there’s one more echo of it in the second half of The Magnum Opus Of The North Is a Cowboy Boot – whose running time is only slighter longer than the time it takes to say the title – where a Floyd-ish choir on the point of escalation is wound down by curling guitar solo that brings everything down to prog without embarrassment.

Whether above the at-brisk-gallop rhythm of the title track and standing just to one side of the Spector-ish John Lennon, or immersed in the weeds of a folk-edged rock dance that infects See You In Fifty Years and flitting through the playful synths of I’m Not Crazy, Cummings is flexible and almost slyly nuanced. The latter of those songs even celebrates the potential for humour, something I doubt anyone has found, let alone sought, in a Grace Cummings work before. But it doesn’t feel out of place eventually, even if you do check yourself, wondering if you picked that up or just projecting.

There is drama but it comes in varying shades: in the powerful vibrations of My Island And Me, which evokes Nina Simone; in the pulsing ‘80s drums of My God; in the ragged edges of emotion in Fake that push hard into your chest like a science fiction soundtrack echo; and even in the seeming absence of it in Paradise, whose spaces invite speculation. The shape of Bloodhorse! is fluid, but it is not amorphous. Fascinating.