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.
