LYN BOWTELL – PAPER CUTS: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- Aug 15
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 20
LYN BOWTELL
Paper Cuts (Checked Label Services)
THE SWINGING ENERGY of Cold Shiver that opens this album – honky tonk piano eventually coming to the fore, like someone with something to say elbowing their way to the front – is some sneaky subterfuge from Lyn Bowtell.
First up, it’s a hot contradiction of the song title and the bitter snap of some of the lines, a sleight of hand that has you contemplating both moving your feet sideways in a happy dance and using them to kick the nuts of the not-very-charming subject of the commentary. Longer term, it foretells both a strong counterweight to this (or similar) charmers and songs that might exist in both front bar and back room.
The truth is more nuanced, more complicated than that on an album of interconnected storytelling that keeps pulling back a layer then another layer to reveal certainty sometimes barely clinging on, forthrightness battling insecurity, and real questions about whether bitterness is a weakness or the strength in defiance. Similarly, it becomes clear by the time you reach the end of Paper Cuts, the final song and title track, that if these songs are going to be sung in a bar most of them are going to hush the room, and if anyone is dancing it will be solo.
Maybe the best way to understand this is to take us to the appropriately named Scene Of The Crime, just after the midpoint of the record The setting is familiar mid-tempo pop/rock, the kind where the snare drum smacks and the guitar warbles and everything feels pretty safe for radio programmers and inattentive listeners, not to mention the blithely unaware man expecting forgiveness.
Whatever delusion he has at the beginning of the song – after all he’s told her that he lives with regret, his jealousy a curse, and he has apologised, so we can move on, right? – gets chipped away each verse and washed away with the punchy chorus. She is not for rewinding, “wasting time looking for the best in you”; she certainly isn’t up for repeating, “not even in my imagination”, not even if it means she is staying in indefinitely.
There is firmness in this woman, and it’s not just a façade, but it’s not exactly built on solid foundations yet. “Everybody’s so worried about their way of life, I’m just cheating death,” Bowtell sings, in a line almost thrown away. That this may not be dramatic licence is explained by the preceding song, Small, which has the jaunty tap and bright melody of one of those tie-dyed community ukulele classes, but pierces like a truth-telling session. “Will anyone notice if I don’t get up?/I don’t think I can carry the weight, too small.” There are friends, there is sunshine, can that be enough if it’s paired with speaking some blunt truth?
Maybe the answer is in Ordinary, the song which follows Scene Of The Crime. It’s the after-time, the coming down from standing firm and saying, nope, not me again; the solitary hour when the only thought expressed is internal, and it’s louder than anything else. Just voice and piano this time, and that voice has been stripped of its certainty. “I gave it all to you, and you took it all away, like nothing,” Bowtell offers, remembering the flame and force of initial attraction and contrasting it with the broken spirit now just hanging in the wind. “You made me feel ordinary,” she says with quiet devastation.
From this point to the final song’s, “Your memory is like a paper cut/Won’t kill me but it hurts to touch … Just a fragment of a melody” – served in the kind of heartbreak melody people used to trade their double denim and floor-length dresses for – is a fractured path. Will she? Won’t she? Could she? Nothing is straightforward. But then this shouldn’t surprise because you will have been schooled by now, wondering how you once thought the clarity of Cold Shiver was pointing the way, or the tenderness in I Don’t Want to Stay, a rather wonderful slice of country soul that leans into its Southern roots, was the alternative.
No doubt, Lyn Bowtell would tell you that’s not sneaky, that’s just life.
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