New York-based Londoner Essie Jain returns swiftly with her second album, The Inbetween, the lush and more deeply embellished follow up to her fragile and tender debut, We Made This Ourselves. While the centrepiece of Jain’s music continues to be the core duo of herself on piano and guitarist Patrick Glynn, the lively New York scene has offered up a revolving cast of additional players including French horn, clarinet, cello, trumpet as well as bass and drums...

Since Essie Jain's debut album, We Made This Ourselves, the singer has moved from the internal space of her own apartment, where the that album was made, into a formal recording session at The Buddy Project in Astoria, New York. After the introspective solitude and tightly wound interior of the first album, these expansive subsequent live shows shine a new light on Jain's music. However, this is not necessarily for the best.

The opening track, 'Eavesdrop' was a great way to start the album and I was hoping that the rest of the tracks would be in a similar vein. Sadly they weren't. A personal thing, I know, but I prefer Jain when she's more mellow than trying to be a little upbeat (as in 'The Rights' which sounded a little too much like a Talking Heads single.

For those wondering what on earth the "Special Edition" relates too - as this seems to be the only version available to UK fans - the album was first released on US label Ba Da Bing in spring 2008. The "Special Edition" is released by The Leaf Label and includes two newly recorded bonus tracks: ‘Not Yours’ and ‘I Remember it Just Like This’. The album also features new artwork by British artist Luke Drozd.

Of the twelve tracks on the album, I loved 'Eavesdrop', 'Please', 'Do It', 'You' and 'I Remember it Just Like This'. All of which were mellow tracks that felt like they were going somewhere;

I was ambivalent about 'I Ask You', 'Stop', 'Weight off Me' and 'Not Yours'. These were mostly mellow tracks, but felt very constricted and didn't really seem to do anything special for me.

I didn't really care for 'Here we go', 'The Rights', and 'Goodbye'- which were either a little too upbeat, or Jain seemed stretched beyond her vocal range. But in the end they were all generally too annoying for my liking.

To be fair though, this album has far more interesting tracks than We Made This Ourselves - which seemed too have too many tracks that were too similar to one another, as well as being a little too drab.

On balance, there were more good tracks on here than bad (for my tastes) but to be honest there should be more than a handful of songs on this album to appeal to just about everyone.

7

Nick Smithson