Elaine Morgan, Shine On (D & E Morgan, 2002)
Elaine Morgan has a lovely voice; a true lush instrument. She is also capable of very sweet Celtic style melodies. It's a pity she drowns out these merits behind bad keyboard sounds and sloganeering.
Shine On has the feel, not of a professional independent release, but of a demo tape. The instruments -- mostly keyboards -- are chosen not for their suitability, but for being immediately available, and capable of attempting to sound like a variety of other instruments. This shortcut seriously hurts the album, as the sounds are only almost-right in any given song. It's the musical equivalent of Mark Twain's remark on vocabulary: "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."
Attempts to emulate, say, the wailing of bagpipes, or a rhythm guitar line, fall so far short of the actual that it grates on the nerves. Far better not to have the sound at all than to have such an artifical copy. The few places the keyboards sound best is, surprise, when they attempt to emulate the sounds of keyboards, at moments when the music asks for a keyboard.
Of course, Elaine Morgan is quite capable of performing without accompaniment -- her voice is that sweet. And she does two a capella tracks, the irritating opening "Bright Lights", and "Evensong", which is a highlight of the album. "Halls of Fame" comes very close, having only some very subtle sound effects and a brief choral harmony and the choral harmony actually weakens her vocal performance.
The music itself, if it were performed on the instruments only imitated, is quite lovely, and offers a range of moods. Some tunes are less successful than others, but none of the music is bad. In a few places, the lyrics, like the keyboards, make this beauty less obvious than it should be.
One of the weaknesses of the lyrics is purely mechanical. Songs follow carefully crafted rhyming patterns except when, in the middle of a song, they suddenly don't. Sometimes, most particularly in "Le Rocher" (with the lyrics of "The Rock" translated into occasionally clumsy French and put to a new tune), the lyrics need to be rushed to come out smoothly, and in some places, create near tongue twisters when they should be simple. These flubs aren't constant, but they are persistant; Elaine Morgan doesn't quite have the deft touch with language she has with melody.
The real weakness in the lyrics is her politics. She's an environmentalist, a preacher for the pleasures of the old traditions and the family homestead, a protestor against turning green pasture into concrete city. None of which is, in itself, wrong -- I'm an environmentalist. What irks me is how she preaches of these things. She paints her ideals in black and white, and reduces sometimes complicated issues into melodramatic rah-rah slogans, and reveals far too much naivete. Perhaps I've been spoiled by artist like Bruce Cockburn -- who not only sings about his issues, but goes out where they're happening, finds out the facts, and knows whereof he sings. There's a conviction in work like that which is lacking here; I feel a none-too-quiet urge to shake her out of her simplistic tone, or give her solid information about her most beloved issues.
The environmental theme does work in "Evensong," perhaps because the song is only two verses, and the point is made simply in the last two lines. Brevity, it seems, is the soul of wit. It's where she elaborates on these themes that she comes across as arguing from a position of sentiment, rather than knowledge.
"Bright Lights" irks because this quasi-autobiography paints the search for fame with a purely unrealistic idealism, visions of receiving Grammys and wowing giant audiences that no early career musician should still have -- much less one who has apparantly been making a career as a session musician and touring with several of the stars of the UK folk and country scenes, and who has made a modest independent release of any quality.
"The Waterwheel" is a vision of an urban centre taking over a once rural area -- but the underlying, perhaps unconscious, theme is that those affected ignored the encroachment entirely until it touched something sentimental to them, and that "there was nothing they could do" -- which is definitely true if one is ignoring the trouble.
Even her vision of love bothers me, as "The Rock" spends half its lyrics praising the lover -- and the other half talking about how small and unworthy and pitiful the singer is, how he leads and she follows. By contrast, "Loch Coriusk", another two-verse song, is a rather sweet memory of falling in love, and twice as effective as all the protestations in "The Rock".
I do not say that there isn't a good point at the root of each and every one of these songs -- yes, urban sprawl is a problem that hurts rural lives and wilderness, yes one's true love is often a grand and solid thing to hold on to -- but her blinkered slant on them turns a good idea into a nails-on-a-chalkboard annoyance.
Overall, while the music and the voice are lovely, I could not enjoy the final product without some serious reservations. This album needs instrumentation based on sound, not on what's cheap and available. Elaine needs a better ear for language, and more sense in place of sentiment.
Elaine Morgan's Web Site is here.
