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 GEMMA HAYES Rating (Out of 10): 6 Day One/Hanging Around/Back of My Hand/Over and Over/Let A Good Thing Go/Ran For Miles/What A Day/Tear in My Side/I Wanna Stay/Lucky One(Bird of Cassadaga)/My God/Night On My Side When ‘Night On My Side’ was released in Ireland it came accompanied by a lot of media hype and expectations. It was the debut album of a new Irish female singer songwriter and it had been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Things like that don’t happen everyday to young women from small towns in Country Tipperary. Newspapers and magazines were filled with stories of how she had been signed to Source Records who paid for her to live in New York for a year whilst writing her album and her subsequent affair with Julian Lennon. So to say that I expected great things when buying this album would be an understatement, and to say that on listening to it I was greatly disappointed would be even more of an understatement! Don’t get me wrong, this is a perfectly good album. All 12 songs have been written by Hayes who plays guitar and piano and displays a very promising talent for song writing. Her voice is absolutely beautiful and in places she treats us to some beautifully understated folk magic. But the majority of the album falls into the genre of mainstream rock. ‘Let a Good Thing Go’ was the first single from the album is probably the most commercial track on it. ‘Hanging Around’ is a wonderfully catchy pop song that sees Hayes in fine form vocally, but the highlight has to be the beautifully orchestrated ‘Over and Over’ which is delicate, beautiful and highly evocative. Hayes co-produces the album with the highly respected David Friedman who had previously worked with The Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse, and the result is a very polished, commercial affair. Unfortunately there’s nothing at all that makes it stand out from the crowd. Hayes has yet to find her own identity musically. In places she sounds like Dido, at other times she sounds like Sheryl Crow, but nowhere do you find any hint of originality, any sound that is undoubtedly hers. And that’s a shame really. I get the impression that this would have been a far better album if she’d just been herself, and not tried so hard to impress. But it’s early days yet, and I really do believe that we could be seeing great things from Gemma Hayes in the not so distant future. Send A Comment
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