Beautiful music and boring music are often misinterpreted to be the same thing, a bit like when you confuse hunger with boredom and you wind up with a four pack of Wispa Golds that you just don’t want. As a result it can be difficult to prove what is in fact beautiful and what is just boring. Well rest assured Woman’s Hour are here to put an end to this life threatening argument once and for all (hopefully).
Next to being beautiful, Conversations is also perfection personified. But this isn’t perfection and precision that gives way to cold imagery like hard granite flooring, this is a carefully woven mink rug that has bared witness to all your relationship ups and downs. All through the eyes and voice of front woman Fiona Burgess’ haunting vocals, these are most evident on ‘Her Ghost’ which floats past as if it were caught on a breeze around twilight. While ‘To The End’ begins as little more than a tinkling murmur before the chorus comes on like a car chase of super-charged emotions that has scant echoes of The xx’s fabulous Intro from their 2009 debut.
Woman’s Hour have probably nailed expression of emotion better than anyone in their field since The XX did five years ago and the best example of this is the album’s title track with the central line “Awkward moments of strange affection, that could have been shared with anyone else, not that it has”, is social commentary at its best and could easily soundtrack said moments.
Woman’s Hour emerged in 2011 then after a brief flutter with the spotlight disappeared for 2 years and returned with a record that doesn’t really sound like anything else out there right now. This album pays dividend to the notion that you should never pay attention to trends as eventually they will go out of fashion because Conversations has a quality to suggest it could just be a timeless body of work.
Conversations is out now on Secretly Canadian.