NICOLE ATKINS – DRAMA: REVIEW
NICOLE ATKINS
Drama (Wicked Game/Sun)
IN CASE IT WASN’T ALREADY CLEAR four songs in, Nicole Atkins lets neophytes and casual observers know as Drama progresses that “You’re not in Kansas anymore”. This public service announcement should not be ignored; it is instructive. Keep in mind, as she says elsewhere, “You’re not the only one singing in the mirror”.
There are no plains and homesteads, no tightly held emotions and modestly deployed responses, no bare-bones arrangements and sounds of the fields to be found across these 10 songs. These are songs of company, whether romantic or social, musical or emotional, where people are plentiful and the highs and collapses that inevitably follow anything to do with tricky humans can’t be avoided by hiding yourself away.
Even when Atkins sings “I need to be alone” you know it is going to be temporary, just as when daylight pokes its way into the room you know it’s merely passing, the real action always happening “when the night falls”.
And the nights are coated in flickering light, just like we’re on the cusp as television went from black and white to colour or when clubs were choosing to let your type in but only if you changed those shoes. Just like the clothes are a little bit shinier, a little bit closer-cut, the songs a little bit more, yes, dramatic. However, the retrovision is never fixed in its vertical hold. While much of the album feels of any earlier time, exactly when that is changes song to song, offering a sense of multiple pasts.
There’s Softly, As You Were, which falls between Frank Sinatra and Dusty Springfield: lounge bar piano and acoustic guitar open up to murmured horns and slowly vibrating electric guitar, Atkins at ease but still uncertain, close but just a step back. Like A Stranger takes that bar towards a nightclub where the band in suits and nodding acquaintance with a beard groomer, look over a dancefloor populated by couples whose heads are tipped towards each other and whose feet are shuffling more than stepping. Meanwhile Atkins lets yearning show through the control just as the fuzzed guitar sneaks past the smoothness, asking “Why don’t you kiss me like a stranger/Let me fall in love again” with a hint of abandon if you were to scratch a bit further.
It’s teetering in Cue The Symphony too, where Chris Isaak – who is also her label owner and conveniently cheap to hire for the cheekbones alone even if that voice wasn’t still so creamy – joins in in low-key Orbison mode of theatrical warble just waiting to let fly, the strings and guitar on twang poised beneath them. But Trippin’ On Teardrops has already shown us what that might look like: picture Lesley Gore stepping out of the shadows, showing herself gradually, before the timpani and bells flare up in a flourish, part teen drama and then, when the horns arrive with a Bacharachian surge, part adult conversation.
This says more about me than her I suspect, but I’d have loved to hear some more of these dramatics elsewhere, such as in the torch balladry of another duet, Curtain Call (a duet with Davey Horne sounding strikingly like Alex Turner in his neo-crooner mode), or around the ancient synths and backing-singers-in-long-dresses of Singing In The Mirror. Go big and then go home! would have been my call, which Atkins and producer Pat Sansone would sensibly ignore.
Though I have to admit that it’s not always necessary, even for me, as the pulsing rock/soul and Ellen Foley curl in the voice of Danny, and the beehive soul brass behind the sassy vocal of For No One show. And I have no notes for the buzzy bright pop of Like It’s The First Time, which has intimacy (love a spoken section!) and vibrancy (I dare you not to dance in front of that mirror, with or without the hairbrush) in equal measure.
Hey Toto, I’m very glad we are not in Kansas anymore.
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