Dragonfly Lake
Sally French : Destiny (UK,2002)**°
Usually I am not always too keen to receive or to review singer-songerwriters items because still too many private releases categorised under singer-songwriting are often too basic or too pretentious. I'm glad this release is at first defined under rock / pop although it has all the looks of being a basically a singer-songwriting item. The music has at his best something of a 70's progressive music foundation that came filtered through the more darker 80's, to result in something renewing fresh, especially thanks to the voice of Sally. The sextet band with Sally are accompanying such tracks perfectly, not too much in composing music, but as the perfect studio band, with openings to some improvisational counter parts : beautiful coloured sounds are created by keyboards, electric fingerpicking guitars, el.guitars, drums and the beautiful mellotron. On more easy played tracks Sally reminds me too of more ethereal Celtic music, dark but still sprankling at the same time, and surprisingly pleasant, and at its most easy accompaniment, an 80's pop of Kate Bush, although not having such a high & varied voice, she also succeeds too, in creating a special atmospheric mood with her singing. But there are tracks where Sally experiments more with her voice, like on "The Mist of Avalon", a track with the band on its best again.
I asked the singer-songwriter specialist to review the textual part but he never came to that, wasn't too fond of this album.
