Park Rec.
Maddy + Girls : Under The Covers (2CD with "Pensive") (UK,2006)CD1°CD2**°
Most of the first CD by Maddy Prior and her two supporting girls is pretty a capella, with often a kind of “wooaaa-eeeaaaA”-background singing -the cd cover warned : “contains some use of no language”-. Most of the first cd, as a different part, contains more annoying complaints, almost like in a politicised way, with texts on some, for the writers, disturbing social facts like of some form of materialism without further awareness or scope, but this is all without adding any intelligent philosophy or understanding, vision, structural idea or explanation, this way showing as much a lack of a ‘real content’ as what the frustrated visions complain of. In that way I think that the ‘real’ material girls showed much more directed effects. Only afterwards I realized, because the collection was collected so well that they seemed to come from one vision, that most of the songs were actually covers from mostly, equally (?) frustrated (?) pop artists. The sometimes fastly sung “gospel”-like singing interpretation in combination with the songs sound a bit naïve, and so much taken out of the world of its context, that it makes the singers' position even more outside everything. The girls are not yet showing any creative example of possibilities, because the world they express is one of feeling not wanting to belong here. It takes almost the whole first album before this frustration calms down a bit, when some use of percussion, guitar or piano starts to appear. This can be noticed already in the last few tracks, like “Perfect Indian” in a calmed down emotion and with “7th wave” as a hopeful change. For me at least with the last track, “Slow Dance”, with some appearance of electric guitar, only here it seems that Maddy luckily and finally finds her way back to her own comfortable environment of "folkrock", a musical grounding and foundation, a return which makes me glad, because in this area for me Mandy’s expressions still sound more convincing. The entire second CD roots into that comfort with “her own” expressions and visions, where she has an original use of the folk fundament, making also the vocal arrangements less airy and more fundamental, which is partly based on even much older traditions. Here, the music sounds closer to the heart, less in the head. These six additional tracks entirely make it up for me ; there I even noticed some maturation compared to the early albums I know from Maddy Prior.
Maddy and Girls are Maddy Prior, Abbie Lathe, Claudia Gibson, with some guest artists.
Maddy Prior was the singer from folkrock band Steeleye Span from 1970 to 1996, of which I think "Hark! The Village Wait" (1970) is the best starter. She also did albums with Tim Hart (1971), June Tabor (1976,1988) and had a lot of solo albums since 1978.
