hazel winter: situation normal then (2009)

Hazel Winter
Situation Normal Then ••••
Death Row Bride 

A staple figure of the Bristol underground music scene for nearly two decades, it’s no surprise that Hazel Winter’s third solo album Situation Normal Then – her first in four years – bears all the hallmarks of an artist with years of experience behind her. On the surface her country-noir and folk-inflected music might seem to recall the simple things in life, yet underneath lies something far more unsettling, nightmarish even. In possession of a delicate, almost childlike voice that manages to be both alluring and unsettling, Winter’s approach is roughly the musical equivalent of a Neil Gaiman children’s book – deliciously twisted and occasionally terrifying.

Many of the album’s songs were inspired by fantasy and sci-fi novels and true tales of the occult. An unflinching re-humanisation of the persecuted witches of Roy JM Pugh’s book ‘The Deil’s Ain’, ‘The Ballad Of Geilie Duncan’ is a traditional-sounding folk number with lashings of Jew’s harp from co-producer and Portishead man Adrian Utley that ultimately descends into gory sacrifice and black magic, while the accelerating bite of ‘Dancing The Girl’ draws from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s best-selling book, ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’. Elsewhere, ‘Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers’ is namechecked in the frenetic ‘Turn The Main Siren On’ and John Wyndham’s much revered ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ informs the album’s bracing introduction, ‘Midwich Sleep On’.

But it’s not all based on the ideas of outsiders. Hazel’s more personal ruminations are just as compelling, from the pleasingly mellow, Robin Hitchcock-esque melancholy of ‘Mystery’ to the jolting dark impulses of ‘Music To Self-Harm To’ (”Yes please, take me straight to hell / I’m feeling dangerously well,” she spits), Winter evokes the real-world hardships of trauma and pain. Underpinning everything throughout the album is Winter’s schizoid guitar: growling and chugging in one instance, softly plucking in another, but always pushing a strong course through a motley accompaniment of sounds. The blend of traditional and unusual acoustic instruments with the crunch of the electric guitar works well in the context of Winter and Utley’s upfront, unfussy production. Each instrument, no matter how diverse in tone, has plenty of room to sit in the mix.

Even after so many years in the business, Winter comes like a breath of fresh air in a music scene full of urgent yelping and electronic clattering. And though she stays true to her regional colloquialisms, she might as well be a million miles away from the mockney Dick van Dyke-isms of certain other artists of these isles. Her attempts at combining the idioms of traditional folk and modern sounds are intriguing and ultimately successful. With its bittersweet sound, false starts and expletives, Situation Normal Then is as raw as the northeast wind, but the richness of Winter’s music truly emerges on close listening.

Dan Everett
UK release date: 12/01/09; www.myspace.com/hazelwinter

 

FREE MP3: Hazel Winter, ‘Midwich Sleep On’

 

‘Midwich Sleep On’

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dQHaaCnAyxE]

Written by: Wears The Trousers magazine

Tags: dan everett, hazel winter

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under All A/V, albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.