Nedelle The Locksmith Cometh by: Steve Scully Tue:25-Sep-07 Label: Tangram 7s Year: 2007 WB rating 30 out of 100

Self-perceived quirkiness is the bane of the music industry. It’s all well and good to listen to Joanna Newsom, and you’ll find no opposition in the Wireless Bollinger camp when reaching over to try your hand at a Dulcimer or tap a few single notes on a Glockenspiel. Nonetheless, spreading like a plague in music today, as I’m sure it has been for decades, centuries and millennia, is the undercurrent of self-congratulation, born through the artiste-types who hold nothing higher than their own opinion of themselves. Judging from what she has offered on The Locksmith Cometh, Nedelle Torrisi is painfully close to ticking all these boxes.

A self-professed musician from her days of single-digitry, Nedelle has grasped at least basic elements of numerous instruments, and on this record takes up guitar, violin and keyboards, whilst pottering about with her vocal chords also. Perhaps the most resounding failure of The Locksmith is that it never shows Nedelle to be a master of her craft.

Nedelle’s songs cover the gamut of love and loss – on only one occasion branching out into a left-of-field fable about a boy’s encounter with a grizzly bear (‘Poor Little City Boy’) – but as grand as the notions contained may be, the execution is so slight that any depth is of little consequence. Otherwise potent and somewhat poetic lines are delivered with little conviction, Nedelle’s emotional content drifting by unnoticed: lines such as “I don’t know how you love me” (‘The Last Thing I Do’) are trite, rendered insipid by a voice lacking character.

Musically, the album is pleasant without being wholly effective, and charming whilst never truly convincing. Humming and plucking her way through the opening track, the superfluous 16-second ‘Fanfare’, then quietly going through the motions of the acoustic ‘Ex-Priest’, Nedelle sets the tone for the album to a tee. At no point does she diverge from this exact sensation: her vocals are Newsom-like, her instrumentation based mostly around a gently-plucked guitar, with the odd piano number thrown in and the occasional flourish of the violin, you get the idea that Nedelle is never quite pulling her weight. This is never as blatant as in ‘Ghost Ships’. Lyrics in this case are the strong suit: “Every boy I’ve ever loved/They’re all the same/Just different names,” is blatant misandry, but an accessible-enough sentiment. The track is, in all, merely a promise of a song. The harmonies haphazard, the additional instrumentation unnecessary, there’s no doubt that the verses are catchy, but it is ended prematurely, and never takes off as it should, instead opting for an unfulfilling rallentando and fade-out.

There is one exception to the album’s paradigm. The haunting ‘Poor Little City Boy’ holds many similarities to the rest of the record – it contains all the same misfires, the dodgy harmonies, the one-take messy vocals – but there’s at least a sense of ambition evident. The song itself is ultimately about the death of a boy at the hands of a grizzly bear, immediately noticeable for the lack of ‘love’-based content, and it has an epic, balladic scope that belies the execution. For once, however, Nadelle’s lackadaisical nature is given appropriate context: “Oh no, don’t tell me what comes next/ Oh no, let me make up the rest,” she sings in the chorus, like a child in fear of the untimely death of the story’s hero. To this persona her adynamic, listless style is perfectly suited.

In the record’s final full-length track, ‘The Locksmith Cometh’, a clumsily orchestrated piece finds Nedelle, in her own spiteful way, blandly singing “I want to lock up all the spiteful mouths.” Lock us up, I say. Nedelle’s foray into the world of quirky folk-pop is lazy, monotonous, and forgettable, and there’s a definite inkling that she herself is satisfied with this. Effortlessness is something that only the truly talented artists can pull off. Nedelle shows glimpses of talent, for sure, but whether she is ‘truly talented’ is a question to which only future releases can help determine the answer.