Lucy Rose has spent the time between her previous album Something’s Changing and No Words Left to condole emotions that were thought to not even be there. To see an artist blossom into this beautiful rose (pardon the pun), Lucy has literally grown up with the public in close sight. Mar 15, 2019 Lucy Rose – ‘No Words Left’ review Hannah Mylrea Mar 15, 2019 10:10 am GMT. The musician has swapped pop hooks for ethereal, jazz-laced instrumentation, resulting in.
Lucy Rose has gradually stripped back her sound since releasing her debut album in 2012. At first, her thoughtful acoustic songwriting shared some of her early collaborators Bombay Bicycle Club’s ornate indie twee; later, it came to breathe a little as she explored southern soul on her 2017 album Something’s Changing, her first release as an independent artist after negotiating her way out of her old major label deal. She toured South America alone, liaising direct with fans to arrange gigs and accommodation, and reclaimed control over her career.
It’s a narrative from which empowerment parables are made, but Rose found herself wracked by a loss of purpose and identity in the aftermath. Her fourth album, No Words Left, is her starkest, filled with lyrics about uncertainty and isolation, and yet her most striking, conveying the strongest sense of her artistic identity yet. This time, Rose’s candid, searching songwriting is the focus, buoyed by soft piano, gentle acoustic fingerpicking and subtly deployed strings and brass. The production dwells more on texture and intensity than obvious stylistic signposting: the ending of Solo(w), a forlorn song with the integrity of an early Kate Bush ballad, seems to bloom with yearning, while a silvery glow stirs on The Confines of This World, in which Rose steadily introduces choppiness to the electric guitar and bite to her voice to convey her interior tumult. The fluid, intuitive arrangements let her melodies shine – the tumbling chorus of Save Me from Your Kindness conveys her sheer sense of desolation – and leave space for her tentative delivery to work as an appealing feature rather than a shortcoming. And, in an age where every artist is singing about their anxieties, the rawness of her admissions stand out: “I’m terrified that these things won’t ever change, for all of my life” she sings on Treat Me Like a Woman, a song that manages to swoon and hold its nerve. On Song After Song, she confesses that a friend’s comfort is wasted on her enduring inferiority complex. The bleak and beautiful No Words Left should go some way to mitigating it.
Release Name: Lucy_Rose-No_Words_Left-CD-FLAC-2019-PERFECT Artist: Lucy Rose Album: No Words Left Genre: Folk Year: 2019 Tracks: 11 Duration: 00:34:52 Size: 157.45 MB
Bringing back Something’s Changing (2017) producer Tim Bidwell for her fourth album, No Words Left, singer/songwriter Lucy Rose remains in the intimate, hushed acoustic sphere of her third release. It soon becomes evident, however, that, while stylistically similar, No Words Left is a more somber, heartbroken outing. First track “Conversation” establishes minor intervals and a gentle, woebegone tone from its opening picked-acoustic guitar and partly dissonant, spare strings. Meanwhile, Rose’s resigned vocals seem to come from the adjoining sofa cushion rather than any kind of performance when she confesses “No one loves me quite like you do/But no one lets me down like you do.” The song eventually adds instruments like piano and vintage electric piano to its eerie soundscape. Elsewhere, songs like “Treat Me Like a Woman” and “Save Me from Your Kindness” build likewise elegantly textured arrangements that still seem as quiet as rain or that would notice the subtle scrape of a stool against the kitchen floor. That’s despite the fact that the latter song is built upon electric guitar. In fact, there’s a deceptively large list of instruments represented here, ranging from strings, woodwinds, and percussion to electric guitar, organ and synths. The brief “No Words Left, Pt. 1” has vocals but no words, adding Rose’s tuneful wail to a psychedelic swirl of strummed acoustic guitar and improvisational double bass, piano, congas, and other, harder-to-identify timbres. The instrumental “Just a Moment” is the album’s lone solo acoustic guitar track. In addition to its tone and palette, unifying No Words Left is an overarching loneliness expressed in titles like “Solo(w)” and “Nobody Comes Round Here.” When the album closes with the lucid “Song After Song” (“Song after song after song all about me and my misery…”), it’s a touching, unexpectedly hummable end to a set that’s intricate yet understated, and sad yet comforting.