Loene Carmen - It WalksLike Love

Mon 21st Dec, 2009 in Music Reviews

It Walks Like Love is the fourth solo record from Loene Carmen and is definitely her most complete album to date. While Carmen has always possessed an absorbing, smoky and suggestive voice, her cast of collaborators on the album – including members of The Holy Soul, The Scare and The Mess Hall – has given it a couple more outfits to change into.

For the most part Carmen’s voice saunters all silk and smoke, a brazen beacon of breathy blues shining out from a murky late night dive, but here it also gets to frolic about in some more fertile fields of pop such as ridiculously catchy single Mimic the Rain. Even the video suggests a bit of a departure, featuring Carmen not only outdoors, but also in broad daylight. So while the album may well walk like love, at times it also cheekily carouses like a crush. The Mess Hall’s Jed Kurzel provides a gritty guitar and vocal counterpoint on the haunting Oh Apollo.

Genealogy fans may also like to note that the stark and sauntering track Gauloises Blue features three generations of the Carmen clan, with Loene’s father, jazz identity Peter Head, on piano and her daughter and Bridezilla singer, Holiday Sidewinder providing backing vocals. The musical personnel really enliven this record with many moods and tones ranging from sparse instrumental backing offering a chaste chaperone right through to a full-blooded raucous, rumbling band acting as accomplices to Carmen’s vocals.

The album walks and undulates like love across the sound and sentiment of its ten tracks. After a promising early courtship, things escalate to euphoric heights before fading crumpled and tarnished to the final act, the sombre acceptance of fate and the end of good times that is signalled by a Sunday night.

Carmen is seemingly one of those endlessly creative people with a variety of outlets for her talents. She possesses an almost unassailable and uniquely edgy aura and regard which allows her assemble a crucial cast of players to turn her distinctive voice and a great and diverse set of songs into a magnetically absorbing album.