BMA album review by Vince Leigh
It’s been a long wait for this. Hannah Gillespie’s Paper Heart Angel album has released over a decade after her last work (All The Dirt, 2011) and marks a significant comeback very much worth the wait.
The collection of tracks was produced by renowned ARIA Hall of Famer Kasey Chambers, a collaboration that originated from Hannah’s entry in a competition commemorating the opening of Chambers’ Rabbit Hole Recording Studio in NSW.
The original plan was a single, which arrived in the form of Ain’t It The Best. But Chambers clearly clicked into Gillespie’s sound, and the inspirational cup overfloweth, so the partnership swiftly transformed into an album.
And quite an assembly of songs it is.
Veering from barebones representations of the Americana slash Australian country genre to fuller embodiments in which Hannah’s exquisitely searing vocal is joined by a vigorous rhythmic accompaniment, piano, or reaffirming vocal harmonies, the album is multidimensional and cohesive without straying from its focus.
As though chosen for its fitting thematic concerns, the album’s opener, Wade Out, ushers us effectively into Hannah’s universe of yearning, family life, love, and lament.
We hear:
So let’s jump right in
and swim out
to the middle
The request mirroring our own jumping off point.
From the scenes of moveable domesticity in the aforementioned Ain’t It The Best—which features what might be one of several symbolic lines of the album: ‘Put your whole damn life in a wishing well’—to tales of misaligned connections, the heft and heartache of Hannah’s central themes are superbly matched by her performance and convincingly reinforced by the other musicians.
This is as raw as the genre is required to be, not to mention uncompromising and poignant; a combo that’s not always easy to pull off.
Seasoned with sprays of the minutiae of life, such as in Radios…
I work the night
You work the daytime
Doesn’t seem right
Friends say they’d find the hours too hard
…amid metaphoric imagery, such as in Thousand Tiny Waves…
There will come a day
When there will be light you see
Washing down these walls
Were it is meant to be
But why’d you have to leave
…the narratives extend beyond the typical, contrasting the two storytelling tools within a song to create an irreproachable depth and temper of spirit.
And this characterization aptly applies throughout this stirring record’s entirety.
Listen to Paper Heart Angel on Spotify, Bandcamp and Apple Music
