judith owen: mopping up karma (2009)

Judith Owen
Mopping Up Karma ••••
Courgette Records 

Judith Owen will be unfamiliar to many in the UK, in spite of being Welsh-born and a one-time London resident. The prodigal daughter has spent the last decade or so Stateside with husband Harry Shearer (that’s the voice of Mr Burns and Flanders to you), releasing records to a solid base of fans and critical acclaim. So, while Mopping Up Karma is technically her first British release, it’s also the work of an established artist. Fittingly enough, however, her return to the homeland is marked by a collection of songs written in 1998 when, by her own account, she was still becoming accustomed to life in America. That she’s chosen to pose on the cover in full period costume, wielding the eponymous cleaning utensil like an anti-aircraft gun, shows that she’s retained that dry British wit, pairing it in Mopping Up Karma with clean-cut songwriting and a well-tuned sense of the dramatic.

While it all sounds good on paper, that writing date of 1998 serves to instantly place Mopping Up Karma very much within the Girl Power decade, sounding at times like a cross between Tori Amos’s ‘Silent All These Years’ and Meredith Brooks’s ‘Bitch’, as sung by Vonda Shepard. This is by no means a bad thing, however it may sound. In fact, it’s what makes Mopping Up Karma so instantly likeable. Opener ‘Creatures Of Habit’ rocks in on that familiar tinkling piano, and probably would have been featured on at least one hit TV show had it been released at the time it was written. You can’t second-guess the delivery, however. While the instrumentation is at times dated, with guitar and piano lending a comfy cushion of soft rock, Owen’s raspy, sweet, Americanised voice demands attention and harmonises otherwise anachronistic elements.

Certainly, Owen deserves credit for staying true to the original vision of her younger self. She hasn’t tried to jam these songs into more modern frames, just given them the attention and craft that they deserve. Where it works, it is absolutely sublime. ‘Let’s Hear It For Love’ is a lost hit, with Owen providing ironic, deeply felt lyrics: “it’s a man and a woman / it’s heaven, and it’s human / and there’s nothing better going”. ‘Inside You’ is a creepy, blindingly original ballad on the weary topic of mothers, sung, it seems, from the perspective of being in the womb. ‘I Promise You’ is more straightforward, but so beautifully performed and simply presented that it is a real highlight of the album. There are misses too, however; ‘Get Into It’ is an embarrassing pep talk that sounds like it has come straight off the ‘Baywatch’ soundtrack: “Get into it baby, and do whatever you can… / every woman, every man, enjoy your life”. It’s an unbearable listen, in spite of Owen’s good intentions. Likewise, ‘She’s Alright’ is an ambiguous bit of moralising on the subject of plastic surgery.

Nevertheless, Mopping Up Karma is a fine album, full of sparkling moments – much like Owen herself, who, seen live, is wickedly funny and charmingly, disarmingly honest. She’s putting a lot of work into wooing British audiences at present, touring with Richard Thompson’s ‘1000 Years of Popular Music’. She certainly deserves recognition on these shores, not least for the fierceness with which she works that mop.

Scott Sinclair
UK release date: 19/01/09; www.myspace.com/judithowenmusic

Written by: Wears The Trousers magazine

Tags: judith owen, scott sinclair

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under 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.