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A DAVID KIDMAN REVIEW FOR ACOUSTIC ROTHERHAM

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JUDE COWAN

DOODLEBUG ALLEY

Jude Cowan – DOODLEBUG ALLEY (Own Label)

“You’ll find this one far-out”, said Mr Masher…

“No probs – the more far-out the better, OK matey" I replied.

But I don’t think even that prepared me for the outstandingly unique nature and exceedingly rewarding (if undeniably ultra-oddball) delights of Doodlebug Alley.

For delights they most certainly are – although as with any truly eccentric artistic creation there will be reservations and/or elements that take a bit of getting used to. It’s a dead cert that some listeners will turn off within a few seconds of the opening track (title song) bursting upon your ears in all its strange glory. A strange and determinedly individual glory that’s oh so hard to describe, let alone pigeonhole.

Jude’s a singer-songwriter and poet based down in London, whose description of her own sound as “a cocktail of Eccentric English, fin-de-siècle Gothic avant-garde, Americana and pastoral perambulations” doesn’t quite go halfway; neither does her list of admitted influences, or the critics’ referential namechecks (thus far) of Marianne Faithfull, P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Siouxsie, Cocteau Twins, Lee Hazlewood and Kate Bush.

It’s a cliché, but I honestly can’t think of any one of those mentioned who sounds like Jude, or indeed vice-versa!, although I hear elements of some of them at times in her vocal delivery or in her penchant for drawing on the more decadent aspects of poetry, art (and film and media) history to fuel her striking visions.

On Doodlebug Alley, which appears to be her second CD release, Jude accompanies herself on what sounds like a ukulele-guitar, crossed at times with an autoharp (sorry, I’ve not been supplied with the “official” credits), with occasional moves onto a piano or organ-keyboard – all of which sets her music apart from the boring old singer-songwriter template straight away and kinda demands attention. Jude’s melodies are wild by any conventional standards, often sounding and feeling more like improvised poetry given musical voice than song as such.

I gotta say it, her music will be deemed an acquired taste for sure – and whether you can acquire it for even part of the album will depend on your receptiveness and persistence. I’ve given the album half a dozen plays and it’s obstinately refused to yield up some of its virtues I’m convinced – although, to be fair, some songs do make their mark right away, either because they’re easier to latch onto either structurally or idiom-wise.

The title song’s both a brilliant calling-card for Jude and a good barometer for your likely reaction to her writing, and yet its skewed, mushed-up (almost psychotically deranged) wartime cabaret-chanteuse vibe of the title song (a veritable lover’s stream of consciousness) proves seductive and unexpectedly addictive, with some hard-hitting imagery juxtaposing perceptive, almost childlike word-associations.

If anything, Remember Sinners is even weirder, with a male voice competitively counterpointing Jude’s wayward ululations and cosmic whispers in intoning the lyric’s violent images. Jolly Roger (which, together with the breathless, steamy hothouse aura of Lady Chatterley’s Dream, gives us probably the most overtly Bush-like track) takes the form of a question-and-answer dialogue concerning an affair with a jack-tar, which references folksong and sailor’s hornpipe along its merry way. She Sits At The Window brings disembodied voice samples into a Sprechstimme-style piano-backed art-song setting of Webern-ian pithiness with a dreamlike Satie-esque instrumental coda.

If you can handle those first four tracks, then I’d say you’re either well on the way to appreciating Jude’s extraordinary world; if not, then you’re not likely ever to “get” her. Jude still has plenty of cards to play on the remainder of the album however, from the insouciant (I might say devil-may-care) “boogie-with-Beelzebub” of The Devil Can Take Me and the slightly over-exaggerated Dietrich-style theatricality of Naughty Daddy to the depravity, nay bestiality, of Navajo Joe (there’s a certain Tom Lehrer influence at work here!) and the sinister whistling fandango of Club Apache. There’s also a gawky Changing-Horses-era ISB vibe on one or two of the songs (noticeably in the seamy carnivalesque organ and outwardly jaunty gait), which offsets the significantly darker demeanour of their lyric content. Cruel and twisted takes on lullabies are at the heart of Nation’s Nation, an ostensibly disjointed sequence of acappella child’s rhymes with some really nasty imagery that fair takes you by the throat and threatens to choke your sensibilities. And Alien Folk Valediction takes the mysticality of Robin Williamson and Traherne into the far reaches of the galaxy to the strains of a transformed celestial harp in what’s perhaps the album’s most deceptively straightforward folky setting.

But perhaps the most extraordinary track of all is the woozy, hallucinatory, headily aromatic Lure Of Paris.

You may be tempted to conclude from this review that Jude’s music sounds more than a little pretentious and unduly arty. And sure, there are isolated moments when Jude’s weirdness seems just a trifle deliberate, even manufactured, and although not exactly self-conscious at those points there’s a whiff of the agent-provocateur rather than a natural artistic response. But the fact is that for the vast majority of the time, Jude’s invention is so unashamedly (and refreshingly) conceived that it hurts in its immediacy.

I seriously believe you need to experience Jude’s disturbing, unsettling shapeshifting visions at least the once.

Me, I just can’t get Jude’s unique creations out of my mind, and for all its wilful eccentricities I’m absolutely convinced that Doodlebug Alley will become one of my discs of 2010.

www.myspace.com/judecowan

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