Gemma Ray
Island Fire
Shock
When she plays live, Ray's signature sound-enhancing device is a carving knife which she glides over her guitar strings. In A Vanity Fair interview Ray says “it’s responsive to the tiniest tweak, and it’s never the same twice. Sometimes you get a resonating squeal, and sometimes you hear a low cello drone. I quite like the spontaneity of it.” It’s this attention to detail, and attention to drama, that makes Ray something special.
Lydia Cole
Me and Moon
While Blind Boy at first sounds like a downbeat song about disappointment in love, it’s bubblegum pop compared to ten songs that follow it. Titles like Love And Loss And Love, and What We Were set the tone for an album that conjures up the image of a young woman in a moth-eaten sweater sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up against her chest.
The Cranberries
Roses
Cooking Vinyl
None of the songs on Roses have the urgency or anger of Linger or Zombie, leaving O’Riordan’s patchy lyric-writing up for closer examination. “It’s raining in my heart every time we are apart”, “got a pain in my heart whenever we are apart” and “have you ever have an empty heart? Did you think it’d ever fall apart?” are lyrics from three separate songs.