Album Review

Kate Walsh – Light and Dark

• 26th Aug 2009

Kate Walsh’s second album “Light and Dark” is in many ways the musical equivalent of water. The record, in its water-like persona, trickles along with delicate liquidity, flowing with a cute transparency and a continuous rumble of angelic harmonies and naive lyrics. Another way in which the album is like water is that once swallowed, it leaves an unfulfilled yet pleasant feeling in your stomach, it offers nothing extravagant and leaves no sweet taste of sugar or spice, just a bland yet almost beautiful nothingness. The only way in which my musical metaphor fails is that unlike water, Light and Dark cannot take any shape, instead it goes from track one to track twelve, a barrage of charming, boring and piano-driven pop songs. Nothing else.

Her voice, as velvet as the Queens gown is an exquisite, well spoken whisper that devotes more time to rasping and showing off a tremendous ability to hold gothic and mystical notes than it does time to sing anything worthwhile. The fact that a voice like hers fails to say anything of real substance or style is the real let-down of Walsh’s second album and leaves you drifting off into a plethora of forgetful ballads, sometimes, but not always tinged with a youthful beauty.
Certainly not seminal but ultimately adorable, Walsh’s Light and Dark will not see her propel and become the next Florence, who has the whole abstract youth with a lovely voice thing sewn up, but it may make a tired, lonely man float off into dreams of clouds and colours, rivers and shapes, which is always a nice thing.