A Girl Called Eddi - Review

a hypnotic elegance

The search for new singers who can properly be labelled as music’s “Next Big Thing” is a difficult task, fraught with many false dawns. Those tipping Katie Melua earlier this year have been left looking the closest thing to crazy in their prediction. So why now should we pass this poison chalice onto A Girl Called Eddy?

Erin Moran, who confusingly is A Girl Called Eddy, has composed a fine collection of songs, melodic and tender, for her debut. The album is filled with 60s-style grooves, tinged by a healthy infusion of chilled jazz sensibilities. From its low-key start, Moran draws you into her wistful, melancholic world of lost loves and heartaches.

Although much hyped as a new Dusty Springfield, her vocals are more pitched between the aching vulnerability of Karen Carpenter and the languid drama of Chrissie Hynde. Somebody Hurt You is a delicate ballad, which drifts over you with a dreamlike beauty, her smouldering vocals wafting on a lush orchestration that is as smooth and fragile as angel hair. The opening bars of Heartache, ironically evoking The Carpenters’ Close To You, melt into a lonely a cappella, a musical parallel to the abandonment of which she sings.

Although there are points where laid back becomes horizontal, just as you might think of using A Girl Called Eddy as a spirit level, a track like Life Thru The Same Lens kicks in, resembling a Scissor Sister track with a bitter, cynical sting in its tail. Similarly, if Burt Bacharach had been asked to rewrite Mr Bo-Jangles as a Christmas single for Texas, the results would not be far from People Used To Dream About The Future. It is the big sweeping production number, which, if it doesn’t make the hairs stand up on your arms, you are dead.

What makes this album more than a pastiche of a bygone style and more than a reproduction of Moran’s singing idols is that she has written songs from her heart about real life and real emotions. Kathleen is inspired by the loss of her mother for instance. There is a hypnotic elegance to the album, the beauty of the arrangements become a veneer over the ache of Moran’s introspective lyrics and immaculate phrasing.

Although it might be a little too polished for some tastes, A Girl Called Eddy is a breathtakingly confident and moving debut. Call off the search, Katie, we’ve found music’s Next Big Thing!

A Girl Called Eddy by A Girl Called Eddy
Label: Anti
ASIN: B0002854QU
Catalogue Number: 67192

Review originally published 19 July 2004

Well looking back from the 50/50 of hindsight of 2007, it strikes me as poignant that we still have the ringletted moppet Melua with us with her bland ditties absorbing increasing radio playat the expense of artists genuinely liked by a broader swathe of the public.

A Girl Called Eddy, on the other hand, failed to make the breakthrough this album deserved. According to the always-dubious authority of Wikipedia, Erin is working in 2007 on a follow-up album...

Link: MySpace