Album, Single and EP Reviews


 

 

  Lighthouse & The Impossible Love by Greta Gaines


Lighthouse & The Impossible Love cover art

Artist: Greta Gaines
Title: Lighthouse & The Impossible Love
Catalogue Number: Big Air Records
Review Format: CD
Release Year: 2013



Sunday morning 5 a.m. and I’ve got rambling on my mind. The sun is shining and I can – just about – see the sea. There’s 200 brake under the bonnet and a CD player filled with enough sounds to keep me going all the way back to civilisation. Looking in the mirror I can see Aberdeen but it won’t be there for long. Of that there is no doubt.

The CD player is on random selection and, as if a greater power was programming my soundtrack, there was Greta Gaines and her album “Lighthouse & The Impossible Love”. She sounds like a rock chick lost on some west coast highway. Only she’s not just some rock chick. Her songs do sound like throwbacks to the seventies with both melody and  tendency to run hot on deeper concepts much to the fore but this is a bigger thing than my man and me music. You might well be impressed by sinuous sensuality of “Good Side”, for example, or the equally commercial “Jaded” and so you should be for they mark Ms Gaines out as a proper songwriter who knows what it takes to make people like a song without them needing to know why they should like it. The magic, however, is in the more ethereal – and dare I say soulful? – songs like “The Quickening”. A song less immediate perhaps but a song that speaks well of her maturity and emotional range.

I look left and see a herd of buffalo. It’s a small herd but it is a sign nonetheless. The time of the intelligent rock songwriter is here again and Greta Gaines is the proof.


www.gretagaines.com
Reviewer:
Review Date: June 23 2013