Review Summary: It’s pretty much a kitchen sink piece of pastiche.
If you don’t know who New Zealander Gin Wigmore is, you’ll probably snap your fingers in recognition when I mention that James Bond / Heineken ad. As far as I can tell, she’s the next in a long line of feisty singers trying to secure a space in the crowded retro market. If it sounds like I’m pigeonholing, rest assured she beats me to the punch in album opener ‘Black Sheep’. The lyric sheet fills the bath tub with lines about having ‘a pistol for a mouth’ and hoping that ‘radio won’t mind if she sings a little flat’. It’s actually a pretty good song, with giant rollicking piano tones tonking away at the low end. The track is bookended with fun, almost call and response stuff from her backing boys, and the beat is an ominous rumbling boxcar. Her voice is full of the promised gravel, and she belts out the track like she’s sandblasting the front door of the record company.
Next in line is ‘Man like that’, with a floor pounding beat, sassy backup singers filling in before the pre-chorus, whoops, and the obligatory bad boy story. It’s all over the place, and you can visualise anyone dancing to it being a hot mess come the song’s frenetic finish.
The rest of the album invites us to hop in the Mustang and take a nostalgic trip with some classic American fare on the radio – the polished surf rockabilly of ‘Devil in me’, the swooping 60’s classic balladry of ‘If only’, more foot stomping tracks, horns, and a real country rockabilly twist in ‘Sweet Hell’.
It’s all delivered with real enthusiasm and the production makes it sound huge, bright and bouncy. However, the lyrics are as generic as they get – mostly tales of nefarious guys. Gin’s voice starts off sounding impressive and colourful, but the incessant vocal affectation becomes wearying somewhere during the runtime (and this is not a long album). The production starts to become a one-note anvil you lay your head on, and that voice becomes the hammer. One wishes it would dial down to 10 for a few songs, or the tone of the music would match the roughness of the voice.
In small doses, I think some of the stronger tracks could be a nice inclusion on a party playlist. I don’t think this is really my thing, but it’s a mostly fun 36 minutes of facsimile. And the last track is really something – ‘Singin’ my soul’ rings out with shimmering acoustic guitar and restful slide; Gin lets the big single sound drain out of her voice. It’s kind of the predictable, “real” song at the end of stylised album, but that’s ok. The romance missing on the previous syrupy ballads is found. We feel a little sad and wistful with our singer, waiting on the porch for that lover who finally gets her as the sun goes down.
