Coming on like the ultimate dark chanteuse, Wendy Bevan conjures her first album in 10 years and what a trip it is. This is one for your Hitchcock and Lynch fans, an album which creates a cinematic world in which Bevan guides you through shadowy dreamscapes full of intrigue, desire and the play of ill fates.
Produced by Nick Rhodes, it is all 50s guitars, spooky synths and soaring strings, and yet its Bevan’s remarkable voice - honed for years on London’s jazz and theatre scenes - which steals every one. Innocence is a melancholic epic, sounding like Cocteau Twins trapped in Manderley, Bevan’s voice playing in the tension between suspicions of betrayal and the pull of love-lust, where vulnerability is under threat and yet thrillingly so.
This kind of darkly seductive edge is where Bevan loves to play. Opener Sirens is a delirious drift into threatening waters that are hard to resist and leave you swooning. Violet takes a more electro approach, a dramatic tale of tangled love, with the title character a doomed femme fatale it seems, though the ambiguity of these songs adds to their mystery. Love Is Outside of Time has the woozy romanticism of Lynch muse Julee Cruise. Sleepwalkers speaks of somnabulists in an ‘everlasting night’, which may mean a jilted lover lost in post-breakup loneliness, or speak to a wider experience of numb bewilderment in a darkening world; as with many of the songs here, it takes you under its spell then slips away leaving you wanting more.
So, more of this kind of thing, please... with Marianne Faithful gone, we need our dark chanteuses, now more than ever.
Alone with the Unknown is out now
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