Little Scream - The Golden Record Album Review

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'.

So, let's call her a musician. A good musician, good enough to attract some of the most talented musicians from her local scene, including The National's Aaron Dessner and Thee Silver Mt. Zion's Becky Foon, both of whom appear on The Golden Record. Good enough to sign to Secretly Canadian, and good enough to tour with Owen Pallett. Good enough to compose and record a confident, intricate, subtle début album.

The Golden Record is an extremely subtle record: it makes no attempt to broadcast its charms or ingratiate itself with the listener. The first couple of times you listen to it, its songs will just stroll past, whistling insouciantly, making little attempt to draw your attention.
If you notice one thing, it will be their eccentricity: their unexpected feints and shifts in direction, Sprengelmeyer's strange lyrical phrases ('the people we see are skeletons/we all know by name'), the way her use of the electric guitar sometimes unexpectently nods towards classic rock, and the extent to which her use of space and silence gives tracks like 'People is Place' a slow, strung-out feel.
These features of the music don't add up to an overt, self-conscious, look-at-me-I'm-wacky oddness; they're simply the result of Sprengelmeyer asserting a distinctive artistic vision. The more you listen to The Golden Record, the more her vision draws you in; with each listen, you'll come to appreciate further her intimate voice and songwriting ability, the rattling piano which dances its way through 'Cannons' and the bittersweet melody of 'The Heron and The Fox'. You'll forgive the missteps, the too-subtle tracks in the album's middle section and the repetition of some ideas, because you know that this is just a debut, and better recordings could be on their way. And you won't be tempted to mention PJ Harvey, not even once.

Nick Gale