Marianne Faithfull has enjoyed a long career of music. From her early appearance in the early ’60s, with a best-selling song (“As Tears Go By”), through her late ’70s re-emergence with Broken English (1979), and her subsequent releases (over ten fascinating batches of songs), Marianne Faithfull has managed to maintain her expected rough edges.
With Broken English, she established herself as a singer on the outer fringes. She explores jealousy, betrayal, and other dark corners of the human existence. Every so often, she would attempt a lighter approach but the interest in her music as Rock’s hard-bitten singer of angry songs was already in motion.
On her new album, Give My Love To London (2014), she delivers an engaging and enduring collection of tracks. She begins with the title track, and sings about a return to her place of her memories. It seem to embrace the end of a cycle by celebrating (“…dance by the light of the moon, boy, dance by the light of the moon…”). Her “Mother Wolf” is an accusatory track, a seeming metaphor of responsibility and the lack of it during wartime.
With eleven songs, some of them written by such luminaries as Nick Cave (a beautiful but heart-wrenching “Lake Victorian Holocaust”, and the co-written “Deep Love”), Roger Waters (“Sparrows Will Sing”), and Leonard Cohen (Cohen’s more recent composition from his 2012 album, Old Ideas, “Going Home”) Marianne Faithfull returns with a stunning work. She also transforms the classics, “The Price Of Love” (The Everly Brothers), and “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)” (Hoagy Carmichael).
Give My Love To London is a great album not to be missed. If you enjoyed her past works, especially her harder-edged albums, then Give My Love To London should be on your shopping list, even if it is an off the beaten path album by a seasoned veteran.
Release Date: September 29, 2014
Label: Caroline Records
Website
Availability: (CD, DD, LP)
–Matt Rowe