I really love Jessie Grace’s voice. Truly, madly, deeply, bovinely. If you have a minute, if I were to receive a tape of her singing the Old Bletchley telephone book accompanied only by Eric Pickles making under-arm fart noises, I’d probably give the damn thing a decent review. So if in her wisdom she decides to make a four song EP consisting largely of workmanlike blues numbers, then I guess I can live with it. But she’s capable of so much more.
Of the four songs on this record, there’s actually only one dud, namely a rushed, perfunctory version of ‘Firmly Down’. This was one of the highlights of her excellent debut album, ‘Asleep on the Good Foot’, and it’s a shame to hear the poised erotic menace of the older version downgraded to an ill-disciplined blues jam. Far better is the Sade-Sings-Zep opener ‘My World is Cold’, which features some gloriously off the cuff rhythm playing from the lady herself, ably backed by Steve Cruickshank’s crisp, dynamic drumming and Francois Pirois’ ego-free bass playing. Grace’s singing is a compound of P J Harvey brittleness and Bonnie Raitt swagger, and it’s the performance of a singer in complete command of idiom and technique. The song itself, straight-down-the-middle blues rock, could have come from any decade back to the Sixties, but it’s done stylishly and with a dash of venom.
‘Trouble Maker’ comes up a bit short on the tunes front, but it has a feisty, rangy energy, Grace singing like a half-tranquilised tigress, alternately playful and coquettish (there are some alarming but characterful hoots out of left field on the chorus) then righteously sozzled. The EP closes with a hushed, angular blues, ‘Restore’, which is cleverly sung but can’t escape a feeling of inconsequence and to be honest the EP, first track excepted, feels like something of a cul-de-sac for Jessie Grace. She is a marvellous musician, with talent to burn and the chutzpah to demolish and recompose wholesale Radiohead’s ‘High and Dry’ (brilliantly, I should add). So what is she doing mucking around trying to be Polly Harvey circa 1995? The blues might have been reinvented back then, but trying to reinvent a reinvention sounds dangerously like artistic paralysis.