Nancy Elizabeth Wrought Iron (Leaf)
4/5
By: Stephen Maughan
The good thing about being labelled as the quiet girl means nobody expects very much from you. If the quiet girl, Nancy Elizabeth in this case, tells people she is off to the Faroe Islands and rural Spain to make a folk record about silence you probably would just wish her well, smiling a little at her naiveness as she went on her merry way. Who on earth would want to listen to a record from a quiet English girl about the power of silence?
Still, there are times when having no expectations placed on a singer can work wonders, and this is the case for Wrought Iron, a rather subtle and sweeping album of eleven distinct and elegant numbers. Elizabeth plays virtually everything here herself – ranging from a dusty piano (which is the focus of most of the record) to guitar, glockenspiel, violin, and vibraphone., all carried along like a gentle snowstorm with her crisp clear voice.
For her subtle singing voice is the key to the entire album, and as impressive as she is at playing a wide variety of instruments, her main strength is her voice, and I haven't heard a female voice this enchanting for quite a while (think Hope Sandoval with a dash of Leonard Cohen), and throughout the album, her voice is both reassuring and uplifting despite the often bleak subject matter hidden in the music and lyrics. You can easily lose yourself in this kind of bare, minimalist music, but Elizabeth captures your attention with her gentle voice, and you could soon find yourself falling for the quiet girl from Lancashire in a way you didn't think possible.
Wrought Iron as a piece of art is certainly different from the majority of records we've heard this year, and I'm sure the music press will love it, but I wonder if it's really going to have any lasting impact - the interesting and subtle can quickly turn stale and mundane to the record buying public. It's a shame because Nancy Elizabeth is clearly a very talented lady, with a wonderful voice, and some parts of Wrought Iron come close to true brutal, the idyllic vocal led 'Feet of Courage' (where Elizabeth waltzes “I need no-one to tread the water with me”) and the lovely 'Canopy' in particular are worth checking out, and it will be interesting to see how far Elizabeth can take this. She certainly has musical talent, and a wonderful voice that would get Andrew Lloyd Webber's cheque book out in an instant.
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