The term “singer-songwriter” doesn’t really do justice to the powerhouse known as Juliana Meyer. On Holding Up the Sky, her first album, she plays almost all the instruments (including guitar, cello, mandolin, double bass and glockenspiel) as well as doing the engineering and mixing, in addition to the usual singing and songwriting duties.
It’s an impressive and polished debut. Meyer’s voice is sweet, strong and clear (although she’s a little more uncertain in the falsetto part of her range). Lyrically, the album is about the standard singer-songwriter fare: relationships, emotional ups and downs, a desire for self expression and so on, with an excursion into politics on ‘Making profits selling rockets’. There are echoes of Joni Mitchell and Alanis Morissette.
My only criticism of the album may seem like carping: it’s a little lacking in tension, perhaps too clearly the work of an artist working with people she likes. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding spats in the studio, but “creative differences” have produced some of the best work in the music world – think Lennon and McCartney, Morrissey and Marr, Anderson and Butler. A critical collaborator might have given Holding Up the Sky a rougher, more interesting edge.
But whatever the minor weaknesses of this album are – or perhaps because of them – Meyer is clearly on the verge of joining Katie Melua and Natasha Bedingfield in the pantheon of sweet-voiced young British stars. No aspiring artist ever went wrong by being too easy on the ear; being beautiful, young and multi-talented never hurt anyone’s chances either.
She might “feel like a square inside a circle” sometimes, but Juliana Meyer is going to fit in just fine.