Devon Sproule - Don't Hurry For Heaven

I know I go on about Devon Sproule too much. I also know that there are perfectly intelligent, tasteful, sensible people who will never, and not for want of trying, understand what on earth I see in her. But I do honestly think of her as one of the very loveliest things I've ever heard - a woman whose freshness and sincerity are matched so obviously by the clarity of her beautiful singing voice, and whose folksy, loopy guitar-playing in turn echoes that voice so well. I love her strange phrasing, and the deep chords she plays; I love the way her voice alternately swoops and hushes or closes a line with a squeal; I love her lyrics, which are full of love and wonder for the world she lives in: its sights, smells and sounds, all conjured in slight strokes. Nowhere is this more evident than on her best album, Keep Your Silver Shined, in which she paints an assured picture of her conjugal bliss: 'Old Virginia Block' is an ode to her home state set to a rollicking country stomp complete with racy fiddle, while 'Let's Go Out' is a jazz-inflected ballad telling the tale of her and Paul Curreri's homely courtship, with clarinet fizzing in the background. 'Stop By Anytime' is the very essence of a lazy afternoon in the country - "if you could come around, I'd take you out to see the bugs in the big woods shine", she says, betraying the eye of someone whose awe for the world is immense: "cat bells' jingle in the middle of the night,/fruit flies drown in the undrunk wine/cracked blue china in the rack going dry". I think that perhaps I'm especially drawn to this trait in her because when I return to my house in Normandy, I feel a similar sense of wonder and delight in all its particularities - the creak of the stairs, the smell of the cupboards, the feel of the lawn under my feet, the sight of the well through the curtained window, the shine of the brass pans against the dusty red-bricks where they hang above the blue wood-stove in the kitchen fire-place. You never really hear about this sort of thing in song.





Anyway. The reason I'm going on like this is that I'm finding it so very, very hard to convey just how disappointed I am in her new album, Don't Hurry For Heaven. I hear in it none of the energy and fizz and delight that are so obvious in her two previous records - she is so lacking in zip and sass, and for the arrangements of these songs (which, though not a patch on some of her more beautiful stuff, still contain some moments of loveliness) she has chosen to go down a curiously bog-standard route. I can see that to her this may have felt like a new direction: making her sound more accessible, with more guitars and some call-and-response-ish stuff. But it just descends into dull mid-tempo jamming so often, and you lose trace of her lovely guitar-playing, which really is the best accompaniment to her voice. Her voice in this is too polite, too unlikely to go off in a funny direction. And she was obviously uninspired with the writing: where once she gloried in the everyday, some of these songs are merely commonplace.

There's still some good stuff, but it could have been so much better: 'The Easier Way', for instance, would have benefited from a very simple treatment to offset its delicate love message. Lumbered as it is with pedal-steel and added voices, it loses the freshness of its melody. It could have been one of my favourite songs, but it's so timid, so staid. As it is, I merely like it, and I do still think the pure tune is Joni Mitchell-worthy. 'Don't Hurry For Heaven' has been ruined, and from being a charming, sprightly country ditty it has now been given more vocals and guitars and that omni-present pedal steel. 'Julie' has its moments but is maudlin, and 'A Picture Of Us In The Garden', contrarily to so many songs here, should have been beefed up. Throughout, the production is completely wrong, giving a grainy texture to these songs and to her voice - when her main asset is the wonderful clarity of her voice and playing. And I'm dismayed that the jazz-folk-pop direction of her last album has been jettisoned, when it was actually so original and clearly suited her style so well.

So now I don't know what to do. Sproule was beginning to make a little bit of a name for herself with her last record, with a television appearance and some radio play here in England - and I don't think this record is going to keep up that upward curve in her career. I'm desperate for her to return to her roots and realise what made her such a breath of fresh air.


Reading: Lorrie Moore, Like Life