A Cave, A Canoo is Shelley Short's third release on Hush records and, to my delight, arrived at my door yesterday morning. I’ve been listening through her two other Hush releases, Water for the Day and Captain Wildhorse, a good deal lately and find her soft, sparse songs the perfect accompaniment to autumn’s arrival. Short’s music is ostensibly folk and, like much of that genre, feels intimate and personal, engaging the listener in a private, quiet world. Short plays acoustic guitar and sings, in a lightly affected, sweet and youthful tone. In doing so she produces subtle and enchanting folk songs.
Short’s songs unfold slowly and sometimes charmingly clumsily. In A Cave, for instance, a jaunty piano provides a proxy percussive backing to Short’s singing. This is a theme in A cave, A Canoo, where the simplicity and delicacy of the melodies is often contrasted by glimpses of darker, more foreboding instrumentation. In Familiar. the album’s second track, Short’s acoustic plucking and singing is joined by tinkling piano and a jarring bass tone, which seems to grow in menace throughout, to produce an unsettling dichotomy. All through the album Short marries her own playing with elements of the epic or baroque. This is reminiscent of Nina Nastasia and Jim White’s album You Follow Me in which Nastasia’s singing was given an altogether different dynamic by White’s raw, clamorous drumming. In contrast though, A Cave, A Canoo is quieter, with more space afforded to Short’s vocals; the instrumentation often hushed. This is a great album, an album which rewards the listener for repeated plays with its detailed, if understated, compositions.
Shelley Short is playing in Leeds on the 17/11/09 at Nation of Shopkeepers.
