Nancy Wallace – Old Stories (Southern)
3/5
By: Roxy Fisher
Nancy Wallace is the lady from the Memory Band and Owl Service. She’s a voice to be reckoned with and has a penchant for stealing emotions and moulding them to her liking… so why is her debut still not working for me?
Old Stories is a melodic midnight carpet ride though typical tales of yore… girl yearns for boy in a slightly morose yet somehow uplifting way… you know the score. A story you’ve heard before? Certainly. A voice you’ve heard before? Unlikely. As proven in her covers EP The Young Hearts released four years previously Lady Nancy has the ability to give interpreted music a true uniqueness. You may have heard this done before… done to death even… but Nancy will make you want to hear it at least one more time.
Opening tune ‘Sleeping Sickness’ is beautiful, and makes you want to lie on your back and watch the stars…or something equally cheesy. Folkiness arrives like a bearded express train in ‘Many Years’ - banjos, finger picking, the lot. Not a bad song by any means, but a little less spectacular than the first – a tad predictable maybe and unfortunately a whiff of what’s to come.
The pace drops off delicately with sweet cover ‘I Live Not Where I Love’, which Wallace undoubtedly makes her own. Next up is ‘The Woods’, a short ditty with impressively smooth accordion accompaniment. ‘Waiting’ nestles in the middle of the album and is the catchiest of the bunch with a sing-along-chorus and a sway-inducing breeze of a beat.
The subsequent songs are without doubt charming, timeless and beautifully constructed but begin to sound a little repetitive which is a great shame. It’s pretty easy to forget you’re listening to anything in particular. I feel slightly blasphemous knocking a British folk wizard of infinite talent… but this is definitely an album I would more often leave than take.
Artists in this article: Nancy Wallace
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