LOU RHODESBeloved One
Infinite Bloom Recordings
“A wise man said to me, ‘Don’t underrate simplicity.’ So I stripped my life away and try to live each day by day.” These beautifully delivered words are the perfect way to open an album which sees the normally intensely private Lou Rhodes at her most candid, as she pours her aching heart out through the course of an enchanting, emotive and truthful debut album.
Rhodes spent a decade as a member of English trip-hoppers Lamb, but, following the break up of both her band and her long-term relationship, decided it was high-time that she embarked on a solo recording. In doing so, she stripped away the electronica in a return to her hippy roots, and poured her heart out in the form of the ten songs that comprise Beloved One.
So, gone are the drum ‘n’ bass rhythms, the samples and the complexity, and Rhodes’ distinctive and warm vocal is accompanied instead by an acoustic guitar, strings and hand-drum percussion, to create a beautifully fragile body of downbeat-yet-dreamy and enchanting folk that talks knowingly of life and of love.
Beloved One is an album that comes from the heart rather than the head, and is a work of tender, often melancholic beauty that, for both its honesty and its quality, richly deserves the countless plaudits that it has already received. Anyone who has ever felt the breathless joy and the heartbreaking agony that love can bring cannot fail to be touched by this album.
1 comment:
I have just discovered that Lou has had to postpone her UK tour due to the sudden death of her sister.
My thoughts and kindest wishes are with her.
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