Not your typical whingey singer-songwriter shit

Sitting in the corridors of Trinity College, listening to Carly Sings debut album The Glove Thief on a dodgy Discman, and watching the artist herself waltz about in time to the music, I scribble a note and wave it at her.

‘If you were reviewing your album what would you say about it?’

She holds a pen to her lips in a moment’s contemplation before scrawling “I’d say it’s retro, but refreshing. And maybe that it’s boldly putting the emphasis back on lyrics (without it being whingey singer-songwriter shit)”. She has the ability, it seems, to read minds as well as make music.

For the Carly Sings project is as far from whingey singer-songwriter shit as one can imagine in a world where Glen Hansard is on the television as frequently as our recently departed Taoiseach. Lyrically, she focuses on relationships, enough to set the CLICHÉ ALERT alarm bells ringing in an instant. Yet she filters her subject matter through a haze of classical allusions, inventive imagery and a knowing smirk to make flicking through the sleevenotes almost as fun as listening to the album itself. Opening with the line ‘You live over Mount Olympus in America, and I, I live behind green trenches of ammonia’, The Glove Thief immediately reassures that it’s no O or Living.

Rather Carly Sings’ debut album bears more resmblance to last year’s Choice Music Prize tip, Adrien Crowley’s slow-burning Long Distance Swimmer. Hardly surprising given the session musicians and production they share, there is however one most notable difference between the two albums: Immediacy. Like a more pop-minded St. Vincent (or a less pop-minded Feist, for that matter), the 70’s French pop fidelity and minor orchestral backing covers what are essentially out-and-out pop songs. Knowingly retro, there is nevertheless, as she puts it herself, a refreshingness about The Glove Thief arising from the fact nothing on the airwaves or the interweb sound quite like it at the moment. A hodge-podge of the neglected style of bossa nova, 60’s sensibilities and 50’s production values makes this possible.

Her art is not without ambition either. Arising, most probably, from her bilingual upbringing, living between France and Ireland most of her life, she has international pretensions for the album. Self-releasing it in Ireland and iTunes, she aims to see it on French, American and Swedish shelves as soon as possible. She talks of touring Japan not as a pondering of some flighty dream, but that she really ought to pick up a Japanese phrasebook next time she’s in town. Deploring the unmotivated, insular outlook of most Irish bands, she refuses to make Irish success her end-goal. Judging by the press already garnered here though, she’s going to achieve it regardless.

The album is written from the point of view of a contrived character, who is aware of her own heightened sense of drama, seductive ability, and playfulness. Carly explains a “glove thief” as “somebody who goes around stealing people’s hearts”. In the avoidance of an epic (read: cheesy) closing statement in the vein of ‘and the album might just steal yours’, I’ll opt for ‘it might just steal somebody’s Choice Music Prize 2009 and all’.

The Glove Thief is available from Road Records on the 18th of April
www.myspace.com/carlysings

Daniel Gray Poser.
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