The Whole Thing: ONLINE REVIEWS of ALBUM "HIGH RELIEF"
GoGirlsMusic.com
"While listening to Seattle's own Susan Court, I'm reminded of Tori Amos. This is in both the vocals and music style in her folk-pop debut release "High Relief." The CD is really good. I especially like 'Parrish Blue' and 'Between the Quiet.' Check out her web site and take a listen."* Hit Picks: 'Parrish Blue' and 'Between The Quiet'
The War Against Silence - glenn mcdonald
Inclusion in TWAS's "Best of 1998" and "Best New Artists" lists!"In a year when much of my favorite music was quiet, but Tori got louder, Emma Townshend and Susan Court revived Kate Bush's narrative of literary diffidence, Emma leading it clicking across the marble floor of chill, geometrical, stopped-time galleries, Susan delving into forests where it's getting warmer, but the monsters are starting to wake up. "
(detailed review at TWAS) - glenn mcdonald
"...Susan Court's particular mixture of Kate-like traits combines elements that for Kate belonged to separate periods, the structural simplicity of The Kick Inside and Lionheart, the transitional arrangement complexity of Never for Ever, the production detail of The Dreaming, the textural richness and humanized technology of Hounds of Love, and the melodic discipline of The Sensual World. ... I can imagine unraveling Kate's early sound like a three-strand braid, separating it into Susan, Tori Amos and Emily Bezar, Emily's strand the operatic one, Tori's the emotional candor, and Susan's the rational grounding for the other two."
Read the rest of glenn's characteristically long and brilliant review here!
Indie Journal - Fred Wheeler
"High Relief is simply superb. The opening strains of 'Blight & Bonny' washed over me like some alien tractor beam pulling me into the great unknown. Complex, complicated, unconventional, experimental, surreal; these are all appropriate words to describe this completely captivating CD.... Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys the slightly darker side of pop or elaborate poetic rock peformed by first-rate musicians."See the rest of this review here!
Indie-Music.com - Barney Quick
"The fairy-tale atmosphere evoked by the lyrics is supported by the arrangements and the effects. Lute, recorder, cello, and vocal delay engage our imagination more than the in-your-face starkness favored by most of today's singer-songwriter types...Court has an uncanny ability to beckon us into her perspective. There is something impishly conspiratorial about the way she depicts her characters so we'll be on her side in each vignette."Read the rest of this review here and discover that I'm actually an ice princess!
The Muse's Muse - Ben Ohmart
"A very original voice. With songs as individual as a car crash... Should I go so far (as) to compare her bizarrely pretty vocals and unformulated method of writing/performing 'pop' songs to 1 of my personal heroes, David Bowie? I don't think I'd be far off. There's also something slightly Irish about her presentations. I like her classical background, her almost Elizabethan splendor, at times combining the eternal spirit of past cultures with all the elegance she can locate of the present day. Tori Amos, watch your back."Read the rest of this review here!
FAO CASA GAZETTE (Italy) - Stavros Moschopoulos
"A folk-pop CD full of beaming emotional beauty laced with a brilliant, expressive voice and caressed by Euterpe (the songstress muse) herself. Susan Court's voice has been compared to Kate Bush and Tori Amos but unlike those two she manages to create her innocently radiant aura without the huge corporate support that has created falsities and myths out of minor MTV anorexic stars. High Relief is a propitious beginning for a well-deserving artist."
GroovePlanet and SunsetCruise (audio files available) - Steve Palopoli
"When three of a singer/songwriter's top three liner-note thank-yous are Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Brothers Grimm and William Shakespeare, you're likely to start hearing a "Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!" from your trusty Pretension Detector. But hold off here, 'cause Washington state singer-songwriter Susan Court is actually going somewhere with this on her new album High Relief.She certainly does fine by Gilman, whose early feminist novel The Yellow Wallpaper is still one of the most powerful tales of madness in Western literature. The opening track, "Blight and Bonny," even makes a couple of direct references to Gilman's classic, and with creepy lines like "Little Miss Red/ Has lost her head/And she can't think where to look/It could be stuck within the pages/Of a very heavy book/She knows better than/To pick it up" the song is almost a musical re-telling of the story.
The child-like, almost sing-songy rhymes of those lines also hint at Court's debt to the Brothers Grimm, which she pays in full with the wide-eyed but vaguely sinister tone she maintains throughout High Relief. Literary influences aside, Court strongly evokes Victoria Williams in this regard - though the music is more along the lines of Sarah McLaughlin's airy first album ... the perspective and occasionally her vocal delivery on songs like "Fundevogel" echo the fantasies and nightmares of childhood with the same passion that Williams or the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris are able to deliver.
...It's interesting that one glaring omission from her list of literary thank-yous is feminist fablist Angela Carter, the premier twister of fairy tales for adults. Considering the vividness and sophistication of Court's songwriting, I'd love to see what she could do using Carter's complex mythic landscape as a map."
***Note: Above is the expurgated version of this review. For the full version, follow the link at the top. While I don't for a second wish to deaden the sweet afterglow of a keen, refreshing, witty, intelligent review such as that supplied by Mr. Palopoli, it behooves me to make the truth be known. My hat-tip to Shakespeare was not for "Sir Galahad" but actually for "Blight & Bonny" in that the title and refrain are an adaptation of the lines "Hey, nonny nonny" and "...be you BLITHE and bonny" in a song from _Much Ado About Nothing_ (which conveniently describes this whole diatribe of mine). And as for pretension, well, he pegged me but good. :) -SC