Jenny Gillespie's new album, Cure for Dreaming, contains songs that span a variety of landscapes, from a warm Venice boardwalk with its assortment of "chakra hucksters" to a woman's solitary spiritual rebirth in the banks of an East Coast river. Themes of motherhood, marriage, spirituality and dying enter into the music but through the medium of playful conversational language...

Call me old fashioned, but I like to listen to songs where the singer can... well, sing.

You wouldn't put up with a drummer that was wildly out of time; a guitar player who played duff notes; or a keyboard player who played like Les Dawson... So why is it that on so many occasions someone who can just about hold a note is allowed to be the singer in a band. Even if they're the main composer of the music, or the sole member I do wish that some would sit in the background and hire someone with a decent voice.

I'm being a little harsh here, because Gillespie can sing, but on 'Dhyana by the River' she doesn't have the vocal range to hit all the notes. And it's not intentional because when the same segment is repeated later in the song she manages a better stab at it. Some will no doubt argue that this is the song of someone's spiritual rebirth and this is designed to represent the change. That is just nonsense, as Gillespie wavers on occasion on some of the other tracks.

The album contains 8 tracks (35 min, 18 sec) and while it wasn't an album I was a huge fan of, I did enjoy the beautiful closing track 'Pain Travels (Chakra Huckster)'.

5

Nick Smithson