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Where the hell did this came from? Is this the same Cathy Davey whose debut album, 2004’s uneven and dull “Something Ilk”, received plenty of accolades, but by no means warranted a ticker-tape parade? Is this the same girl with a guitar who always seemed to fit into niches, but never seemed capable of carving out one of her own? Did I put the right CD in the player?
Yes, yes and, well, yes. “Tales of Silversleeve” is the album of the season which will leave you breathless and not just at the panache and dash employed to merrily pack those preconceptions off to Coventry.
Here’s a bright, bold and breezy rush of imagination, creativity and sheer glorious sounds, an album of sequins, sparkles and swagger. There are 11 songs here which are utterly – utterly – in love with the possibilities which occur in that atomic pop moment when everything is destined to go boom, if you know the right buttons to push.
And Davey has that knowledge. Sure, her accomplice, onetime Sneaker Pimp Liam Howe, helps clear the lines, but there’s no over-priced journeyman producer here trying to turn the Dubliner into his latest puppet on a string. Every note you can hear sounds as it’s coming from the heart – and there are even a few which sound like they’re coming from the soul too.
Just listen to the nagging groove propelling “Moving”, for instance. The pitch is so simple, so obvious, so daftly perfect, that you wonder just why no-one thought of it before. The track is no fluke either because it is preceded by three others and followed by another one which all bear the hallmarks of greatness. That’s five killer songs in a row, including the showstealing “Reuben” and the slinky “Mr Kill” (both of which Robyn and Kylie would happily kill for), before Davey pauses for a cup of tea and a biscuit.
The most charming pop album you’ll hear in Zero Seven. It’s time for that ticker-tape parade.
- Irish Times
If you've heard Cathy Davey's 2004 debut 'Something Ilk', you'll have been aware that at some stage during her career, there was a tangible possibility that she was going to make a great, great record. It's doubtful that anyone would have seen it coming so soon, though; Tales of Silversleeve, the Dubliner's sophomore album, not only displays Davey's outstanding songwriting talent but also bears witness to her considerable musical evolution in the space of just three short years. It's an immediately captivating collection, with the first four tracks as good an opening quartet as any you'll have heard before: Sing For Your Supper is a mesmerising, shiver-inducing Sundays-style janglebeat, a song that strikes blow after blow until it builds to an emotional climax; Reuben's quirky, memorable pop gallop sees Davey swap guitar for a capricious piano riff; The Collector slams a dose of sassy jazz-meets-nineties-indie on the table, while Moving's superbly-delivered, slick electro-pop is just simply gorgeous. Even on the more sentimental, exposed offerings (No Heart Today, or alluring acoustic closer All Of You) Davey's sensual thrum and lyrical idiosyncrasies carry songs like no instrument could, while Rubbish Ocean sees her entwine that sultry voice around a '60s soul/lounge track with a hip beat. These are more than solid, well-constructed, well-played songs, though; there's a magic about Tales of Silversleeve that makes it an album you're almost afraid to listen to twice, in case it's not as good as you remember the first time. Without doubt, one of the best albums of the year.
Lauren Murphy
- VODAFONE.IE
Discography
Something Ilk LP 2003
Tales Of Silversleeve LP 2007
Reuben - CD Single / Download Sept 07
Photos
Bio
CATHY DAVEY ‘TALES OF SILVERSLEEVE’
According to Cathy Davey, the mercurial Irish singer and songwriter of dreamtime pop music, she was destined to create little else but art and music. She has not, she maintains, the memory for doing anything else. What she means is that from an early age she was unable (or, possibly, unwilling) to enter into conventional modes of expression. Although her parents are creative types (her mother is a sculptor, her father a musician/composer), it’s likely you won’t find Cathy egoistically extolling the virtues of the artiste’s life. Such a carry-on was sucked out of her many years ago due to her dyslexia and more recently by her hard won common sense.
“I was always away with the fairies when I was a kid,” she recalls, “and I would never engage with people. I couldn’t talk in class, and there were all these things that would lead me to doing something else I was better at. I was also secure enough within myself that I wouldn’t bother learning anything I wasn't good at. Perhaps that’s what spurs people on to achieve things academically - maybe that’s what prevented me from embarking on the academic life. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but that’s how I explain it.”
Davey explains things very well and very coherently. She fully admits that the years spent going to school and growing up were not the easiest for her or her parents. She would bunk off classes at school, for instance (in particular, history), and sneak off to the music room, where she’d spend most of the day playing piano. Sometimes she would remove herself from school completely and spend the time at home drawing pictures. And then there was the occasion when she was chucked out of school for writing dirty poetry, an event that Davey remembers as being a crucial part of her development.
“Getting punished gave it something of an edge,” she states. “I was mortified on being found out, but I wasn't disappointed in myself. And besides, I think they were good poems. The first one – this was when I was in quite a religious school in England; it was horrible – was a drawing of a wall, with graffiti scrawled on it. The words were some that I had heard the boys say - silly things about male organs, which I didn’t understand. A teacher found it in a waste paper basket, pulled it out, and compared it with the writing of the other pupils. A very pathetic thing to do, I thought. The school authorities told me I was handicapped, that I should be going to a special school, and that I should pray for forgiveness.”
Throughout and reaching beyond all of this was the problem of Cathy’s sleeping patterns – or, rather, lack of them. Not sleeping well in the traditional sense, she says, was once a huge part of her life. “It affected every aspect to my life – from the way I could handle situations to talking to people, promoting gigs, expending all that adrenalin and not having it replenished in any way. That’s how I see it, and it was a bad cycle. Now, however, I have a dog that sleeps beside my bed, and I sleep like a baby when he’s there.”
Tales of Silversleeve is Cathy’s second album on Parlophone. Her first – 2004’s Something Ilk – was critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful. Despite the disappointment of the latter (which, wisely, was not balanced out in Cathy’s mind by the former), she has superseded all expectations by delivering a collection of less intense but no less exciting songs. It would be fair to say that the whirlwind of industry pressures swirling around Something Ilk did little to assist Cathy’s erstwhile fragile system.
“I didn't like anything about that time,” she freely admits. “I wasn't ready for what happened around Something Ilk, because it more or less came from nowhere. Also, I had no idea what to do business-wise, and had little idea how to connect with music industry people or what it was like being part of a record company. And money – it was never a part of my life, but then it became so. There was nothing about the experience that was pleasurable, but in retrospect that was only because I wasn't ready for it. Now, it’s become pleasurable because I had everything ready to go – songs, recordings, mindset. Thank God the buzz around Something Ilk backfired, because now I get to do it the right way.”
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