A collection of rootsier tunes ideal for shuffle or playlist.
Anyone who has attended gigs of a rootsier persuasion around Manchester and the northwest in recent years will almost certainly have come across the hard-working and frequently gigging Izzie Walsh; from involvement in songwriter nights to supporting the likes of Kassi Valazza, Walsh has been a regular presence. In the last couple of years, she’s been less visible due to some serious travelling but is back, for now, to launch this album, Where Do We Go From Here?, its title posing metaphorical and literal questions.
The album opens with the title track, where banjo and violin frame Walsh’s trad folk-tinged vocal stylings amid the repeated and catchy refrain of the title. I Need You More, which follows, is in the same vein in terms of pace, structure, and instrumentation, and would also make a good single but might have been better served with a different point in the running order.
Set Back initially sees a reduction in tempo before martial drums kick in and ghostly, echoed response vocals punctuate the repeated refrain, and that happens also on Human Touch, where there’s a quieter start before the drums and full instrumentation kick in. This one has more of a Levellers feel to it, but lyrically it follows the pattern previously seen of there being a lot of singalong repetition.
Golden Sands offers some difference in terms of pacing and instrumentation, being more ballad-like in tone with orchestral-type backing, before Lightning Strikes follows the blueprint of the opening tracks of slow opening turning into a brisk, refrain-repeating, catchy vocal.
British Summertime Rain starts quietly and initially resists the temptation to bring the drums in to pick up the tempo; rhythmically, the picked string instrumentation employs some good musical pathetic fallacy, and then there’s a break in the middle of the song, and the drums kick in, the tempo picks up, and the refrain is repeated. It works as a one-off, but gets a bit wearying when a good proportion of the songs on the album have followed a similar pattern.
No Hard Feelings varies its tempo much more subtly and gives the song a more varied dynamic, with interplay between mandolin and violin working well. A Dozen Knots An Hour, the album’s penultimate track, follows a similar, more reflective tone before the final track, Took Her To Heart, finishes with its immediate, brisk and jumpy tempo and Charlie Heathers of the Levellers-style drumming; there’s a key shift too.
On Where Do We Go From Here? Izzie Walsh has collected a group of songs that work perfectly well as standalones, but when collected show a bit too much similarity in structure and tone for this to hang together well as a varied and cohesive unit. Put them on shuffle and/or on a playlist, though, and there’s a lot to like.
