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When the very first lines on your album are “Hello my little trainwreck, I am your worst fear/I’m a mortuary postcard, I’m a graveyard souvenir,” you’re setting the bar pretty high for the rest of the record. A lesser songwriter than Thea Gilmore might not be able to maintain that level of achievement through 14 songs, but for the British songstress, it’s just another day’s — or year’s — work. The damn near relentless onslaught of incisive, arresting imagery is the perfect complement for arrangements that combine contemporary folk-rock with a quirky, kind of post-Tom Waits sonic sensibility. Things on Murphy’s Heart never get as far out as the Waits oeuvre — nothing can camouflage Gilmore’s smoky, sensuous voice, after all — but this album is surely no genteel coffeehouse affair either. Gilmore was still in her teens when she began her recording career with 1998’s Burning Dorothy, and this, her tenth album, finds her the 30-year-old mother of a three-year-old son. Don’t think for a second that the difference is inaudible. Not to fear — Gilmore is too savvy a songwriter to fill up Murphy’s Heart with mawkish odes to parenthood, but there’s an audible increase in her gravitas here. You can call it maturity if you want, but whatever it is, here’s hoping it keeps on going.

Fuente: LimeWire Music Blog