It’s been a while since we’ve heard from singer-songwriter Juliet Kelly, an artist who first burst through on the London scene more than a decade ago and has acquired a burgeoning reputation since through national touring.
This album, mostly her own music and lyrics plus a cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ and like that song Spellbound Stories takes its inspiration in literary sources, novels such as White Teeth and The Color Purple, that have fed the singer’s vivid imagination.
A studio album recorded in London with Kelly's band featuring keyboardist Nick Ramm, who makes a wide range of interesting sounds behind the singer, plus Oli Hayhurst on bass, the former Orient House Ensemble player Eddie Hick on drums, and a tabla-player guest in Manjeet Singh Rasiya on ‘Magic and Mystery.’
Quite middle of the road in places yet hard to dislike, Kelly has an attractively warm voice blessed with great diction and the ability to shape a phrase, the songs that caught my ear are the jaunty ‘Little Things’ (‘The little things about you/The little things that make me love you’) and ‘Beautiful Smile’ with its clubby stylophone-like metally sound intro from Ramm the lyric of which has quite a lot of clarity and directness (I’m in love with your smile, beautiful smile) that invades you after a few listens. I also liked the Dawn Penn-like swagger of ‘Forbidden Fruit’ and Ramm’s acid-jazz organ flavoured run flowing into the engaging heart of the song. Some of the others I must confess passed me by or just didn’t stick around in my head long enough to bed in but there’s enough here to return to with pleasure and Kelly is well worth hearing live. And she’s launching the album on 18 June at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in London. SG
Juliet Kelly, above