Little Scream

Laurel Sprengelmeyer is female, and she's a singer-songwriter, but you shouldn't read too much into that. The fact of her gender, and the fact that she writes music and gives voice to it, could easily lead people into making rash assumptions about her début album, The Golden Record, which she has released under the name Little Scream. It could conjure up the same old comparisons - comparisons to PJ Harvey, comparisons to Chan Marshall, comparisons to Beth Orton - even though her music is less intense than Harvey's, more original than anything Marshall has released since 1996, and less likely to appear in a Ford Mondeo advert than Orton's work. It could encourage critics to write faintly patronising reviews giving her a pat on the head for being a woman who makes music and placing her firmly within a musical ghetto, the walls of which are constructed on the basis of its inhabitants' anatomy rather than their sound - a ghetto labelled 'female singer-songwriter'.

Continue reading: Little Scream, The Golden Record Album review