Liane Carroll

The Right to Love

Quiet Money

THERE are few sounds more uplifting than Liane Carroll finding the joy – and sometimes the pain or the atmosphere – to be explored in negotiating a particular passage in a song. She does this again and again on this collection of songs that examine, celebrate and mourn love in all its glorious and not so glorious aspects.

Carroll’s stock-in-trade is believability. When she sings Tom Waits’ In the Neighbourhood she takes the listener down streets with tipped-over garbage pails and newspaper sleeping bags and on a down-home acoustic guitar and voice reading with an exuberant scatted solo, she really does have Georgia on her mind.

As well as being about love, this album is about putting Carroll’s magnificently expressive voice in the right settings, and the arrangements are superb, with horns, rhythm section and Mark Jaimes’ many-sided guitar talent applied with unerring empathy. She phrases a little like Michael McDonald on the country soul-styled It’s A Fine Line but mostly she sounds like herself, zooming in on Carole King’s gospel essence on Goin’ Back, finding soulful layers of affectingly raw drama on Stevie Wonder’s Lately, and sounding charmingly, utterly bewitched on Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark.

Rob Adams