Free healthcare, gun control, a grown-up leader …
Canadians have a lot of reasons to be cheerful these days, maybe that’s why Terra Lightfoot’s latest sounds so joyous.
New Mistakes presents Plunger with a dilemma: we have no idea what to call it, other than excellent. There are plenty of albums that do ‘eclectic’, but none that do it as much or as well as this. It’s like Terra has whizzed her favourite elements of the last fifty years of popular music up in a blender and made a smooth and intoxicating cocktail all of her own.
Typing ‘heavy spare blues riff twinned with anthemic dance music’ looks plain wrong, as does ‘brooding Judie Tzuke-meets-R’n’B’ but it’s there in opener Paradise, and the stirring Norma Gale, and it sounds terrific.
There’s shades of 50s doo-wop and the Spector of 60s soul in the big-production cheating-song Two Hearts (complete with “sha-la-la-la" bvs) and the To-Know-Him-Is-To-Love-Him-on-ketamine-vibe of Three In The Morning, and in Hold You, where an Adam-&-The-Ants-tribal-beat-as-rendered-by-60s-Detroit underpins twangsome raw guitar, barrelhouse piano and full swinging gospel choir vocals.
Flavours from far south of the 49th parallel come in the bouncy Delaney & Bonnie southern soul of Slick Back Kid with its clever off-kilter beat and brassy slide, a lazy Youngian Drifter and the Bandesque shamble of Ruthless featuring chunky meaty guitar and a killer “quiet before the storm” crescendo close.
Barrelling melodic indie pop comes in the kick-driven, air-punching chorus of Pinball King, and the stylish boogie of Stars Over Dakota with its unexpected carney atmosphere, while the closer Lonesome Eyes is another genre-mashing mix: trippy, jangly guitar, liquid loping bass and tribal toms lend a touch of Deadery before a lush, goose-bump inducing chorus, closing in a multi-layer gospeltastic Great Gig In The Sky wall of voices laced with stinging guitar lines…
… and running through all of this is Terra’s fantastic voice: rich and sonorous, thrillingly powerful (without resorting to bellowing like some): the mellow finger-picked You Get High shows its full range, running from lower smokier register up to high and breathy, and throughout brimming with an ecstatic clarity that’s like being hosed down with ice cold champagne while pirouetting through a field of sunflowers…
OK, we’re going to need a lie down in a darkened room now, but New Mistakes really is a very exhilarating collection: it’s chock full of sun-drenched, blissful, songs with more hooks than Captain Birdseye’s tackle box.
There are plenty reasons for Canadians to be cheerful and the latest is the incredible vocal and songwriting talent of Terra Lightfoot.
New Mistakes is released through Sonic Unyon Records on 13th October