Elemental is the best way to describe the voice of Grace Cummings. It appears to spring from a deep well connecting her diaphragm to the massive tectonic plates below, with gravelly edges concealing its true power. And on her new album, Ramona, Cummings lets that instrument rip like never before, opening up new layers of vulnerability. Her voice is deafening in its emotional openness.
Cummings has the worn edges of Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett; sonically some songs on Ramona approach the country-soul-swing of Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. But where that song was a chipper anthem of empowerment, Cummings’ chipper is the kind that shreds dead logs (and exes) into dust: she is righteous and indignant, to the point of eviscerating anything in her path.
