Siobhan Donaghy, Ghosts 
While everything and more has already been said about this album, I feel like it needs to be reviewed properly before I can stop willing it to succeed chart wise, and can just consider it as one of my albums. So far from being unbiased this review is more of my own discovery of Siobhan's music.
The final track, 'Ghost' is perhaps my favourite song even though it was the first Siobhan track id ever really listened too. I remember seeing the video for 'Overrated' and thought the song was OK, but her second single 'Twist of Fate' I vividly remember panning to my friends, because she had the audacity to rhyme say with itself.
can you
find the words to say
that i hate you
its not an easy thing to say
Yet on hearing 'Ghost' and still hearing good things about her first album so many moons later I got my copy and played it all spring. It lacks the epic scope that i feel Ghosts has but lyrically I think they compliment each other so well. they have a unique style whereby sometimes u can listen intently and recognise some semblance of meaning. but the metonymic slide u get when getting lost in her over layered vocals means u drift off and pick up the significance of different lines each time. so in a sense this review is my penance for stalling her career last time mocking her lyrics.
Healing Heart forgive this Hurt of mine.
'Don't Give It Up' starts with a mild electronic wailing, it sounds like a poltergeist transmission going from feedback to clarity and out of focus again as the relentless throb of the beat kicks in. Clear vocals tell us that something other this way comes, with a sense of impending terror, and slowly these are replaced almost with a second voice of a protecting angel that softens the warning from the first vocal. The chorus sweeps up and around uniting us all, by reminding us we all have scars in our own way. Ultimately i believe the theme of the entire piece is calling for nothing less than the uniting of all humanity. urging us to not give it up or mess it up, to understand and to empathise that there always lies a bond between us as humans even if their seems to be a hemorrhage between our own heart and mind. At 2.42 we get our first breaking through the clouds moment of the album.
Didn't we make it nearly, for everything that i hold dearly
This feeling doesn't last as were back down to Earth for 'So You Say'. A song brimming with bitterness lyrically is sung so beautifully its hard to see it as the dark song it is, until accompanied by the video perhaps. Its a song about conflict each line says one thing and corrects itself: don't say a thing about me, say that you can live without me. The grey area trying to sort wrong from right and the alternating chorus / verse, soft / harsh structure works to reflect this with the final minute rousing us but trailing off mid flight.
'There's a Place' is a beautiful song, but this close into the start of the album it feels too light. Its sung in the highest whisper with none of the added low textures of the previous two songs until 2.45 when we hit the middle eight.
From this height we get dropped... 'Sometimes' opens with a sound of a back peddling atomic bomb, reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow- not the Klaxons version. Its most clear here but i think it shows up somewhere on most songs on the album. The lyrics of the song are deceptively minimal barely half a dozen couplets it has the backwards sound meeting some whistling melodies, and its lyrically charged with self doubt from feeling alone in a relationship...
my friends all adore you and say I'm losing the plot
how can i grumble when i got what i got ...
only sometimes.
'12 Bar Acid Blues' is similarly pop sounding as 'Sometimes' but in an entirely new style. I think its the song most likened to Revolution in Me and potentially the lyrics are downright bad, but, here they showcase a nicely comical side to Siobhan's work... Ive eaten fish and I'm feeling sick i can only hope ill be landing quick, this side actually reminds me of Kate Bush more than the 'eccentric' pieces later on the album, for some reason this song reminds me of the didgeridoo and wobble board of Rolf Harris from his work on Bush's 'The Dreaming'.
'Make It Right' brings us back to the main thread of the album its a deliciously self critical song that shows the ego at work. A future self is trying to cast doubt on the stoicism of the past but often ends up criticising out 'Adam' yet again.
why pacify just punish me...don't let me take this liberty
The sounds promised in 'Don't Give it Up' here return. Let it be a warning its here to stay relentlessly till we fade out in 5 songs and almost 20Min's time. Where back in that limbo space lost in the storm n only occasionally witnessing that sublime moment of reaching the eye of the storm.
Back with myslf again
all my fears just like a ball and chain
and i know although i am alone
im at home here with my selfish pain
Siobhan's embraces this other persona that's only previously peeked through. colder and bolder, shes closer to the truth, marking this as a truly epiphanic song, a moment of clarity where the veil of propriety has been lifted and although being honest is grueling and selfish its never felt more true and more human. Because...
Lost is where she feels at ease...its written in a code she cant read and it haunts her
...Were straight into 'Goldfish'. at 1.00 we get the closest to sometimes to hearing our backwards bomb...but its trace is echoed all over. Another chorus takes us into the dizzy heights... lift a barrier, people comfort her, through the wasteland deep within her mind, referencing T.S.Eliots 'Wasteland' a landscape of alienation. Here once again Siobhan's mid-epiphany conjuring up what it feels like to be confronted and forced to contend with the bad within us...
she will fight it out
till her strength gives out
should she float like a goldfish in a bowl
she doesn't see it out her solitary world
Channeling her dark side again 'Medevac' calls for help. a medical evacuation from that sense of desperation. An homage to Bush's 'Running up that hill' in both tune and content. Bush wished for a feminist revision, by highlighting the uphill struggle and desiring god to swap our gendered fates. Here, recalling her producer Sanger's drug addiction, Siobhan metaphorically takes his place with her empathy for his unimaginable situation. The bridge and the wailing chorus make this possibly my other favourite.
if only you could wrap me up after all that I've said i wish somebody cared
if only u would fix me up like a ship in the night I'm losing the fight
~
help me out here cos I'm strung out i cant go back there or ill burn out
medic, medevac me up
I've credit for you to blow out the dark
I love the ambiguity: is the medic our dealer or our saviour. we've got the bitter 'dark' that our private hell needing a hand to hold in order to guide us...but is this our problem prior or during addiction?... to concoct me up good i wish somebody would. a good decent fix, a drug or a cure.
so wake up hope its dark n lonesome
i can hardly hardly get over my eyes
it ain't lonely I'm homely
'Halcyon Days' continues the same theme but with a much more calmer interpretation- a melodic homage to Massive Attacks 'Teardrop'. its a Serene almost domestic scene. this time were needing help to stand up in his home, the aching unknown. savouring the stream of consciousness, our epiphany, our halcyon days, we find nothing can be lost from our minds.
in the stream of purest though nothings lost that cant be caught
As the song and the album ends we hear Siobhan complete Kate Bush's intent, Shes swapped places with Sanger. she's left her numb selfish body and transcended through the human power of empathy...
if only could id make a deal with god
and id get him to swap our places
Siobhan's voice becomes masculine and deep and the song winds down, its tender... to behold. She evidently shares the demonic possession she's witnessed and helps by burying it and sharing its grief.
As we hit the silence though... we hear the chiming of 'Ghost', a seemingly nonsensical excercise in the 'purest thought'. Akin to Woolf's stream of consciousness, it is utilised to understand the human condition neatly tying together threads from the previous songs.
swore under an oath to war yeah
fuel full fat her glass of milk warm sitting here sitting in bed
Our bomb sound is now reversed in the rewinding track. It now meets its impact, and this moment in space and contemplation is forced to move on. I hope to more of the same.
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