Female singers in mainstream pop like Mariah Carey and Leona Lewis habitually sustain and mangle vowels to engender fake emotion into banal love songs. The intonation of Josephine Foster is also mannered and eccentric but the effect is much more profound. It sounds like she is singing from the heart and not the head.
Just take a listen to the way she pronounces simple words like ‘adore’ , ‘ground’ or ‘coca-cola’ on her wonderful new album ‘This Coming Gladness’ (out now on Bo Weavil Recordings). Above all, the feeling that come from being exposed to her extraordinary voice is one of longing. This is encapsulated in one of the standout songs called ‘All I wanted was the moon’ where there’s a delicacy to her vocals but also a plaintive quality that is hypnotising.
Her MySpace page refers to the songs “transcendental art-rock” which sounds Pseudy yet highlights the difficulty in classifying exactly it what it she does. Her sound floats between experimental folk and rock without falling easily into either category.
On many of her earlier solo records, particularly the cdrs, her voice is more exposed with just a simple backing from guitar, mandolin and auto-harp. Here she is backed by some neat psyched guitar moves by Victor Herrero and the ubiquitous and inspirational drumming of Alex Neilson. This fleshes out the ten songs beautifully to produce one of the albums of the year.
