Polite lady music will always be with us. There is, though, the kind of polite lady music that makes you want to hand back your gender in shame and the kind that tilts at the sublime. Over the past couple of years, Rumer’s dulcet sorrow has spoken to everyone from jaded music hacks to great aunts.
In 2002, however, it was Norah Jones’s debut album, Come Away With Me, that set the standard for loveliness unencumbered by cool. That record has gone beyond multi-platinum. It is certified “diamond” – the American recording industry’s benchmark for records that have sold more than 10 million copies. Those millions weren’t wrong, either. Jones’s lilting purr, allied to a set of thoughtful, slow-burning tunes, still sounds persuasive today.
Since then, Jones has released a series of serviceable albums; her last was The Fall in 2009. But the artist occasionally referred to as Snorah Jones cut a little looser in her extra-curricular band, the Little Willies, whose country rollicking also featured her then partner, Lee Alexander.
If anything, Jones seems to have got younger over the past 10 years. On Later With Jools Holland the other night, Jones played “Happy Pills”, the deceptively poppy single from her new album, looking as pert behind her keyboard as an 80s teenager in a fringe and a rah-rah skirt.
In a prelude to this record she joined the producer, Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, on his 2011 Rome album. Little Broken Hearts, her fifth studio album, is a subtly different sort of Norah Jones affair. It is still very easy on the ear but improves significantly on The Fall.
Jones is never anything other than understated, even when plotting the murder of a love rival, as she does on “Miriam”, or describing knife-wielding hearts wreaking revenge on the title track. Unlike the best Little Willies songs, these 12 tracks never break a sweat, not even “Happy Pills”, for all its propulsion. “Trying to pick up the pace/ Trying to make it so I never see your face again,” Jones sings, coming as close as she gets to a sneer.
Whether these break-up songs are about Alexander, as they were on The Fall, is a moot point: there is a lot of distilled bile here, complemented by weary wisdom. Jones’s non-jazz ruminations on the jujitsu of love are given uncharacteristic arrangements by Burton. Swinging and twinkling, “4 Broken Hearts” details a disastrous affair that leaves four people bereft.
The title track is a keeper too, one in which the reverb and thump of the music contrast with Jones’s vocals, which swap between smoky and clear.
At their worst, these Norah-Mouse tete-a-tetes are merely pleasant. The sound design is often so nuanced that you might not actually notice the quirky little things that are going on on “Say Goodbye”: the percussive bass line, plunky drums, oriental melody and woozy multitracked vocal.
Mostly, though, Little Broken Hearts finds an effective way to grab the listener by the lapels: with kid gloves.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Über Frank
Seit 1996 bin ich freier Mitarbeiter der Salzgitter-Zeitung, als Experte für das Geschehen im hiesigen Kreisfußball. Daneben sind meine Kolumnen seit 2005 fester Bestandteil im Lokalteil der Salzgitter-Zeitung. Zusammen mit Frau und Tochter sowie zwei gefräßigen wie faulen Stubentigern versuche ich das zu meistern, was das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest an Absurditäten für uns bereithalten.
