Lush Review

The circumstances explain almost everything. She was studying composition, the school gave her players and studio time, and she used them to make an album of dramatic piano led songs with strings and brass arranged around them. Bag of Bones is the best of it, a swelling piece with a genuinely strong melody and a lyric about wanting to be looked at. Abbey is the other one that holds. What limits the record is a formality that the later work would strip out completely.

The singing is trained and careful, the arrangements are correct rather than surprising, and the emotional register is theatrical, all torch song gestures rather than the plain devastating lines she would later write. It sounds like a talented young writer wearing a style she inherited from cabaret and film music. There is real ability all over it and almost no personality yet. Worth hearing to understand how far she travelled in the next four years, and not a record anyone would put on for pleasure.