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Review: 'ATWELL, BESS'
'Hold Your Mind'   

-  Label: 'Bullnose Hoop Records'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '1st July 2016'

Our Rating:
"My songs are mostly about my own life or things close to me", says Bess Atwell of her impressive debut album.

This 21-year-old singer likes quiet countryside places and her ideal is to live in a small community. "City lights, they all look the same", she sings on Help Me Believe and contrasts this with the small-town existence in the first single, Cobbled Streets.

She lives in Lewes, Sussex, near to the South Downs, and these surroundings are where she feels it is easier to preserve her own identity.

For Atwell, being overwhelmed by big cities is comparable to losing a clear sense of self on the internet. Of the online social networks she has grown up with, she has stated in interviews that how these leave her with "no space to breathe" and a feeling of being "constantly faced with a false version of who you're meant to be". This is articulated in the title song where she repeats the lines: "I have no questions, I have no mind".

Needless to say, her own voice and personality resonates through her twelve songs far more than it does on the posts on her Facebook profile! Resolution is about trying to stay connected and centred when you feel most disorientated.

Built around delicate guitar or piano refrains, producer Michael Smith has done a fine job of keeping the musical textures simple while creating arrangements that subtly give the songs a more expansive quality.

The most dramatic song is Jesse with ambiguous and powerful lyrics like "You're sinking to the bottom and you'll die with the earth". This shows that even though the singer's perspective on the world is deliberately narrow, her emotional range has a universality that transcends self-imposed boundaries.

Refreshingly modest and unashamedly introspective, the lack of an overbearing ego draws you into her world and, while there are hints of despondency, the honest expression of her feelings never has a brooding or self destructive quality.





  author: Martin Raybould

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ATWELL, BESS - Hold Your Mind