Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
3 stars
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Melody Gardot husks, nestling an acoustic guitar on her pencil-skirted lap mid-way through her set, “most of my songs are about love.” The yet to be recorded number that follows leans toward the unrequited, as has most of what preceded it. Not that there’s any self-pity in this most self-possessed twenty-something, who’s upped her UK ante considerably of late on the back of her Worrisome Heart debut. You just wonder how anyone so charming could be so taken with heartbreak.
Sporting dark glasses and a cane made necessary by the after-affects of a serious car accident, Gardot cuts a striking figure, and would do even without the back-story of her only taking up singing in earnest as a form of therapy, a tale that will soon be dropped into the dinner-party chit-chats she’ll inevitably soundtrack. In the flesh, the voice may be smokily languid, but in manner and style there’s an understated steeliness to the Philadelphia born singer’s attitude. So when she opens with a slow, unaccompanied blues culled from folk-loricist Alan Lomax’s researches, you know she means business.
Accompanied in the main during a short, dimly-lit set by upright bass, drums and muted trumpet, at times it’s so low-key that Gardot might yet end up as the sort of supper club background act the noirish vamps she so resembles slinked into. The closing Somewhere Over The Rainbow, however, is given a jaunty latin flavour worthy of the Nouvelle Vague franchise. The Duke Ellington encore similarly extends a palette that is fully in tune with the heart of the matter during the quietest of grown-up nights out.
the herald, May 13th 2008
ends
3 stars
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Melody Gardot husks, nestling an acoustic guitar on her pencil-skirted lap mid-way through her set, “most of my songs are about love.” The yet to be recorded number that follows leans toward the unrequited, as has most of what preceded it. Not that there’s any self-pity in this most self-possessed twenty-something, who’s upped her UK ante considerably of late on the back of her Worrisome Heart debut. You just wonder how anyone so charming could be so taken with heartbreak.
Sporting dark glasses and a cane made necessary by the after-affects of a serious car accident, Gardot cuts a striking figure, and would do even without the back-story of her only taking up singing in earnest as a form of therapy, a tale that will soon be dropped into the dinner-party chit-chats she’ll inevitably soundtrack. In the flesh, the voice may be smokily languid, but in manner and style there’s an understated steeliness to the Philadelphia born singer’s attitude. So when she opens with a slow, unaccompanied blues culled from folk-loricist Alan Lomax’s researches, you know she means business.
Accompanied in the main during a short, dimly-lit set by upright bass, drums and muted trumpet, at times it’s so low-key that Gardot might yet end up as the sort of supper club background act the noirish vamps she so resembles slinked into. The closing Somewhere Over The Rainbow, however, is given a jaunty latin flavour worthy of the Nouvelle Vague franchise. The Duke Ellington encore similarly extends a palette that is fully in tune with the heart of the matter during the quietest of grown-up nights out.
the herald, May 13th 2008
ends
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