This is the second full-length album from ROSE KEMP, her first for One Little Indian.
This is the second-generation folk sound of the Bristol Underground! Rose, the daughter of Steeleye Span musicians Maddy Prior and Rick Kemp, is a DIY gigger on a scene which sees fans provide floors to crash on for bands assembled from the members of a musicians’ collective. Talents are pooled and the personnel interchangeable, with Rose and all of her band members currently involved in multiple projects. It’s a sense of community that’s arguably the defining characteristic of a Bristol music scene that was once trip-hop central, and before that, the home of the legendary POP GOD label, whose existence was based on the same family values as the community that has brought Rose Kemp to our attention.
Yet, loneliness is often at its worst when you’re part of a crowd – and my first impression of ‘A Hand Full Of Hurricanes’ is the unexpected flow of discordant darkness and melancholy. The picture painted of depression’s futile and frustrating effects is powerful due to the stark contrast with my hazy, happy visions of life in the extended musical ‘family’ that pulled together to make the album possible.
If nothing else, it’s a record that sounds huge, and this is done by using contrasting ingredients to add depth to the overall picture, even if there’s an abstract quality that makes it hard to tell what it’s of.
Broken daydreams and inert psychosis litter the insomniac thoughts of the artist. It’s heavy shit for a 21year old to be singing about. The deceptively bright and upbeat tap-tapping of ‘Violence’ tests first the water, then patience, and finally the mental strength, before revelling in it’s own delicious stupidity, guilt obliterated by feedback that Kemp counts in under her breath, from a head under the covers.
Similarly, ‘Morning Music’ sounds withdrawn and trancelike, before it’s shaken from a state of near-hysteria or the clutches of a bad dream. Suddenly there is only the anti-climax of the day ahead. Warmer echoes make this sound safer but oh, how it makes the heart sink! In between these two thorns are the complex, layered harmonies of the soothing but vulnerable ‘Tiny Flower’, tiny indeed next to the craters left behind by the piledriver sub-bass that would, but somehow don’t crush the song’s fragile beauty.
‘Dark Corners’ is awash with scraping strings, hollow crash-chords and reverberating harmonics. The melancholy phrasing makes this the perfect backdrop for Kemp’s vocal representation of pain. Her primal screams ring out cystal clear across the murky, jumpy paranoia and lurching shapeless jam that drops in and out of focus all around.
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The swings are as extreme as any mood - ‘Metal Bird’ has a steadier pulse, but also a twisted arpeggio and a notably high-pitched bassline. Disorientated me until the return of the lovely floating chorus had returned like a ray of sunlight. Cymbal crashes and a monster-riff loosened the track’s grip on me three quarters of the way through the jagged mini-epic. It’s a rollercoaster ride through dark emotional territory that’s brought to a miraculously smooth landing using waves of distortion to soften the blows just when it seemed destined to end in tears.
‘Skin’s Suite’ assembles itself following a minute of high-frequency interference and feedback. Kemp’s vocal response is poetic and separated from the murkiness by only the chime of the xylophone
Alone in the echo chamber for the lullaby ‘Sister Sleep’, her voice is uplifting and sorrowful, but the gospel echo sounds strangely incomplete, not because of the lack of accompaniment, but because God’s love, hope, euphoria, is missing, leaving only pain behind.
Kemp’s vocals swell to hover beyond the music like a glow given off by the hurdy-gurdy heartbeat of the aptly-titled final track ‘Sing Our Last Goodbye’.
Splashes of colour give this album strange beauty, and the experimental nature of the music’s sonic drift is more intriguing than it sounds, but there is also a conflict at work or a randomness that prevents the listener from piecing together the fragments, and making sense of it all.
Though ‘A Hand Full Of Hurricanes’ is the sound of a soul bared, what I heard was too complex for me to make any sense out of it - ultimately alienating me I suppose, despite the obvious power and unquestionable depth of the emotions that went into its creation.
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