Album Review

Billy Vincent – She

• 3rd May 2012

She, the debut album from indie folk rockers Billy Vincent’s is a good collection of varied and well crafted songs that display a mix of rounded songwriting and excellent musical accompaniment. It is at times delicate and poignant, at others edgier and dark. There are several musical styles represented here in a diverse and entertaining album.

Singer David Vincent formed the group with fellow frontman Billy Barratt, which is where the name comes from. After releasing two EPs to a lot of good press, this first full length offering shows that the London band has a lot more to offer.

Dead Man’s Shoes kicks the album off with a burst of pure folk and a great opening couplet: “She said our love’s like a paper cut/ she didn’t know it was there till it hurt so much”. It’s a love song with a difference and the sharp lyrics match the fast pace.

And It Fights opens with a lovely slow acoustic guitar and the sweet tone of a steel guitar before the pace picks up. The Wayward Fall In Line has a very Celtic feel, a lively folk song with an edge. It’s not quite two minutes long and seems a little unfinished, but is a lot of fun nevertheless.

After an excellent beginning the next couple of tracks are perhaps somewhat weaker. The slower Whittled Away is a little repetitive, saved only by the impassioned vocals. Where Jemima Goes is a softer love song, with the singer missing a lover’s “blood red lips”, but it doesn’t really stand out.

The next track Feathers raises the standard once again. The vocals have a harsh tone and the guitars more bite as the violin picks out a strident melody. Lost love is again the theme, but this time the tone is of anger rather than regret and there is a dark and menacing undercurrent. It’s a great track, as is the following 4, 5, 6, which has a similar theme, a lover lost to another. Here a nautical melody tells of mutiny and a captain going down with his ship as the waves rise. It’s dramatic and stirring and ends with some great lead guitar work.

Pirates is the closest to a mainstream rock song on the album, the swell of an organ backing the guitars and drums as the vocals soar. There’s nothing wrong with the track, but somehow it doesn’t quite fit the flow of the album.

And then the tempo changes again. Lisson Grove might just be my favourite of the twelve tracks. A piano driven ballad sung strongly and passionately, it’s a London love song that pleads for the redemption of escape: “into the Thames we’ll sail, under the bridge at Battersea”. There’s something wonderfully hopeful in the unquestioning love behind the lyrics.

Beneath The Castle Floor brings back the uptempo folk feel with an unremarkable song, although perhaps it suffers a little from sitting between the previous highlight and the excellent single, Bottle Top. Another lament to lost love, the lyrics here are expressive (‘Wandering London’s underground, tripping on wishes’) and the pain inherent in the powerful vocal delivery is well done.

The closing track, The Ballad of Billy Vincent tells the tale of a horrible historical character whose hedonistic lifestyle descends into chaos: “but my path became tangled as I drank more and gambled and a darkness full upon me.” The story is interesting and at times darkly humorous, but at over seven minutes long the track does wear a bit thin. In an album full of punchy songs it’s a pity that the last one drags a little.

Lyrically, She is an album that varies between the world weary and the uplifting. The folky mix of guitars and the excellent work of violinist Matt Woodward meld together nicely to give a very English take on folky Americana. The pace on the album rises and falls, and the large number of excellent songs more than make up for the few that are perhaps only ordinary.

Billy Vincent are a band with a style all of their own. The mix of musical influences is clearly wide and varied but they have developed an identity that is coherent yet never limiting, and the outcome is an album that is big and entertaining.