I’m not sorry that it hurt
when I took your heart apart‘cause I liked it
I remember how it felt
when I fell in love with someone
and they hit below the belt
My. There’s the other side of being crushed like a bug. “I faked it” has the shrug of past caring down pat. It even has a vaguely upbeat tempo just to rub salt into the wounds. Mo Kenney’s voice lacks effort. It is strong and fresh and dare I say content, as she devastates this poor sod. And those lines about the ice melting in the glass – bloody hell.
If you don’t have time to chase up any other tracks from Kenney’s In My Dreams, chase this. The Canadian singer songwriter is releasing the album on 4th September. The album lurches from the cruel backlash of love in songs like “I faked it,” to wistful yearnings for love in title track “In My Dreams.” It recognises lonely despair, and it assesses the dehydration of love left out overnight. Her guitar playing carries all these weights. At times gently plucked and at other times it is fuzzy and slightly rocky – with a gamut of variations in between.
Kenney’s voice and the sweet harmonies in “Wind Will Blow” remind me of English artists like Rozi Plain or This Is The Kit. Again the lyrics are gripping. “I like the things that you create” she tells the subject of this song, as the guitar provides a sepia backdrop for her words; words that go on to talk about how this person runs through her like a blade. The scene is set, but the plot keeps shifting.
Then we have “Take Me Outside” with its Beatle-like intro to the opening lines:
take me outside
and blow my fucking head offwith your eyes, it’s alright
Sounds like the beginning of a powerful falling-for-you love song huh? Not a bit of it. There’s booze, and there’s blood and there’s not being able to last a year if she’s on her own. In the middle of all this Kenney’s voice is quite beautiful, it sounds young and unaffected. There are other songs on the album that would fall easier into the ‘beautiful’ category, this isn’t one of them. It is poppy, slightly rocky, with great 70s harmonies, and again the crafty happy beat belies what is being said.
I’ve been playing the CD in my car and after a few listens there isn’t one track that I fast forward. Keep an eye out for it in September.
