The outstanding British singer returns, a long four years after her acclaimed debut Not Your Muse, with a classy, passionate set of nine, simmering, smoky, rippling dramatic, timeless numbers in which her vocal prowess is magnificently on show on songs playing on the theme of self and identity. It’s worth the wait, but by all accounts it’s been a fraught, conflicted process of problems and production disagreement to get to this eventual release. As each song is of a uniform pace - slow, serious, sometimes soaring, usually with stripped-back piano to full orchestral arrangements, it’s perhaps best to listen in short doses of a song or two at a time rather than from start to finish, even though it is only 34 minutes, an album to linger over, and often centred on the intense feelings that ensue when balancing performing and real life. Standouts are the opener On With The Show (“And it's a little bit absurd my world spins on / Like a theatre of the day by day, there's so much wrong / Yes, I know out there is our abyss/ But I must dress up and move like this/ On with the show”); the title track (“Don't be surprised when she hurts you in time / When she spits on the rhyme of yesterday's life / It's a very fine line between her world and mine / And she ruses a life, but that's fine”); former Song of the Day This Is Who I Am (used as a theme song in the recent TV series of The Jackal) but most of all the gorgeous heartbreaker People Always Change - “It's just no good for me 'cause I just stay the same / And you know where I'll be, as still as I remain.” Celeste’s blues-soul-jazz voice has comparisons with Amy Winehouse of course, but also Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and greats. At times it cracks a little with emotion on low notes, but also rising strong, loud, defiant and pure on high notes, her delivery sometimes takes on the qualities of a solo trumpet or saxophone from the late 1950s jazz era. This works far better in an intimate music setting rather than the more bombastic and over-stretched feeling of numbers such as Could Be Machine. While, with a big label, she still certainly fits into the mainstream market of the Adele-type market, she is still only 31, and hopefully her career will flourish with more regular releases and timeless, sensitive and powerful performances that will mature yet into a long career. Out on Polydor / Universal.
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