With your hair in a mess, in your outdated dress

The journey continues...

Keep Your Courage (2023)

A gap of nine years brings us up to her last (currently) album - I checked it out at the time and quite enjoyed it but never revisited it, so it will be interesting to see what I make of it after a gap of a couple of years

1. Big Girls
She's sounding very wistful and beaten down by experience, but with some hints of positivity, She's joined by Abena Koomson-Davis (who's got a lovely voice) and a load of horns which work really well.

2. Come On, Aphrodite
Abena and the horns are back again with a much more needy song, begging for an opportunity for love. It's OK, but the content/length ratio feels a bit off to me.

3. Sister Tilly
This is the song I knew best from the album because it's covered in an interesting Song Exploder podcast - it's about the activist generation of women from the 60s and 70s and I think it evokes some beautiful images. And it's a decent song as well. 

4. Narcissus
I'm quite surprised it's taken her this long to sing about Narcissus - he feels right up her street! This is another well crafted song, but maybe a bit lacking in emotion and I didn't need 6:02 of it.

5. Hunting The Wren
Yeah, this is another decent track but it's all very serious and po faced - it just feels a bit too carefully constructed. I miss the old Natalie who would get angry about stuff! And this one is 5:47 long too - more is not always more.

6. Guardian Angel
And all the previous criticisms can be lain here as well, but I actually quite liked it - I'm not saying any of this makes sense, obviously! It's got some lovely strings on it, so that might be it.

7. Eye Of The Storm
She really sounds like someone else on this and I can't remember who it is. The song's OK, but it does go a bit twee Celtic in the middle.

8. Tower Of Babel
Well, there is at least a bit of life to this one - there's a nice jazzy bassline to it.

9. Song Of Himself
And there are signs of life here too - but it could quite easily have actually been a lot more upbeat than it was. Is it too late to save the album?

10. The Feast Of Saint Valentine
She does like to end an album with a slow one and I quite liked this one, but I really didn't need 6:06 of it.

I wouldn't say this is a bad album because it's certainly got some very nice tunes on it but it's just all a bit low-level earnest. It feels like she's going through the motions of protesting against something (and half the time I've got no idea what that might be, and I'm not entirely sure she does either) but her heart's not really in it - she just sounds a bit tired really. For the playlist, I'm going for "Big Girls", "Sister Tilly" and "The Feast Of Saint Valentine" because they've just got a bit more life to them, but as a whole the album didn't really click for me other than sounding "nice".

Wikipedia tells us that Natalie had been distracted from songwriting whilst being a single mother and then she had "surgery for ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament as well as an anaplasmosis infection that led to sepsis" (which doesn't sound fun) but she found everyone looking after her to be inspirational and it lead her back to the creative process. The songs were recorded under COVID restrictions which meant no more than five people in the studio at a time (which might have resulted in the feeling of detachment I got?).  Critically, the reviews were pretty decent but I can go with PopMatters who say it "would be better if Merchant lightened up a bit". Commercially, it did about as well as you'd expect here spending one week in the charts at #58, but it did get to #7 in Hungary.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a CD copy for a tenner or, unusually for one of Natalie's albums, an LP copy for £30 - unless you want a signed LP in which case it's going to set you back £80. All in all, it ends on a bit of a disappointment - none of her albums have been bad but the last two were both "it's all very nice, but...". However, I've very much enjoyed the journey starting from an album I didn't even know existed and finishing with ones I barely knew, with some absolutely top albums in between. If you want to experience her journey, I'd suggest the six studio albums from In My Tribe through to Motherland because I think that gives you a decent flavour of her output over the years - thank you Natalie for many, many hours of enjoyment.

Not that it quite ends there (for the time being anyway) - we've still got a couple of oddities to investigate which aren't really "proper" albums but I think they're worth a look on one last post.

Natalie Merchant - It's nice, but...