Serafina Steer Cheap Demo Bad Science by: Steve Scully Mon:23-Jul-07 Label: Static Caravan Year: 2007 WB rating 79 out of 100

From the opening plucks of the harp strings on Serafina Steer’s cover of Brian Eno’s ‘By This River’, you will take notice, as her honest, breathy, British-accented voice – without the quirkiness of her fellow harpist/singer Joanna Newsom – is so wonderfully evocative of her country’s folk tradition. You may very well swoon over her, as she sings, “so uncomfortable now/ it’s all gone to shit,” with frantic anxiety in ‘Uncomfortable’. Strange little juxtapositions such as these pervade Steer’s debut album, making her so much more intriguing than most other nouveau-folk musicians: she, like Banhart and Newsom, takes a seemingly anachronistic musical ideal and makes it oddly relevant. Her adoption of subtle synth lines offsets any indulgent pastoral feel that folk might evoke. In short, Serafina Steer is a folk musician with a wider perspective, without the complacent earthiness or steadfast traditional bent.

Any conception that Cheap Demo Bad Science will be a traditional folk record are dashed by the album’s second track ‘Uncomfortable’, which is a frantic and off-putting little ditty eliciting title-justifying anxiety. It’s this sense that the singer is a tad ill-at-ease that is the overriding effect of the album. In ‘Tiger’, Steer sings of paranoia, “I think they’re coming for me now”, and the brilliant ‘Dawn Chorus’ is almost a word of warning: “you won’t get home before dawn/it might be dangerous to let you go at all.” The rhythmic changes and wider instrumentation on this track exhibit Steer’s musical flair, as accordions and clarinets make their way into the mix. Again, on ‘Cheap Demo Bad Science’, Steer shows off a flair for straight-forward, lyrical ingenuity. She’s not quite the Mike Skinner or Lily Allen of the folk world, but her often hilarious lyrics reek of the Brits tongue-in-cheek humour: “bread makes you depressed/they said/lack of exercise makes you depressed/ they said.”

‘Roundabout Horse’ sees Steer reading an excerpt from Noel Barr’s children’s story ‘The Discontented Pony’. The story is a quite lovely little one about a Pony wanting to be a carousel horse, with all those lovely little messages about being happy with yourself. Steer recital, over a haunting electronic ambience, again shows her preoccupation with apparent contradictions: a simple, uplifting children’s story is injected with overwhelming sense of tension, instilling it with a nightmarish quality.

As well as offering the album that Tom Waits-esque quirk of the spoken-word track, the song is perhaps the most important on the record in terms of identifying Steer’s overarching thematic drive. The indefinable electronic noise underpinning the track works to add weight to the story’s message, which is ultimately one of discomfort in the modern setting, and the importance of knowing your roots. While Steer may be a modern-folk muso, and she may seem to be defying the well-trodden path of the traditional folky Luddite, her anxiety about the world as a whole is unmistakably hippie. While she is contradictory in a practical sense, embracing forms and structures outlandish and abhorrent to the regular folk musician, there’s tradition coursing through every note she plays.

‘Council Flat’ is as organic and minimalist as Steer gets. While it begins peacefully, the song retains Steer’s uneasy feeling, least of all through her unconstrained lyrics about domestic violence: “she shouts, ‘bring it on, wanker/bring it on, wanker/bring it on, wanker/get the fuck out of my home’.” A ballad about the discomfort one feels when being the innocent bystander to a disastrous situation, the track is possibly the most Newsom-esque of all on the record. While the lyrics may divide, the way Steer uses her voice to compliment the gorgeous harp-work is extremely impressive.

Steer’s vocal talents are again evident on ‘Curses Curses’, a song highlighting her knack for double-tracked vocals, where one voice is projected with some confidence, the other timid and uncertain. Such a dualistic approach is echoed in her lyrics: “I still want you/ But I don’t want this anymore.” The harmonies that gradually overtake the basic melody of this track are gloriously ad hoc, and the swirl of background synth only helps to make this a superbly hypnotic note on which to end this album.

Cheap Demo Bad Science, if not enjoyable, is highly effective. Each song is as carefully controlled as any, and not one is superfluous or lacking in purpose. Although she may lack the grandeur – and possibly the charismatic oddness – of Newsom and Banhart, there is a certain charm in her very straight-forward style. Many may be bogged-down by the beautiful, but by-numbers Eno cover, and lose sight of the album for what it is: highly personal and highly individual.