Love hurts
First album in 12 years from the One Dove frontwoman. By Victoria Segal.
Dot Allison
★★★★ Heart-Shaped Scars SA RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP
A CROWN OF Midsommar-style flowers, white robes, a tor at dawn: the images that start to rise up from Heart-Shaped Scars, Dot Allison’s fourth solo album, manage to be both impeccably eerie and oddly familiar. The Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter emerged in the early ’90s as the frontwoman of the Andrew Weatherall-produced One Dove, a band whose dance-rock pioneering never quite bore the crossover fruit their 1993 album Morning Dove White promised. Allison isn’t the first former raver to find comedown comfort in pagan folk and mystery cults as the heat and light of technology cools; it is not impossible to trace a line from the Higher Than The Sun mantra of One Dove’s Breakdown to Heart-Shaped Scars’ fractured cosmic wondering.
The full glare of Linda Perhacs’s
Parallelograms bounces off opening track Long Exposure, a gentle wronged-maiden lament complete with Snow White-style glass coffin, and Allison quickly heads into a world of ancient woodlands, ambivalent nature and lingering ghosts. Field recordings of Hebridean birdsong and sea add authentic ambience. Occasionally there’s a hint of outside worldliness – the faded photograph on Long Exposure, the “slip inside my haunted house” on The Haunted – but otherwise, Allison seems out on her own with her fragile voice.
There’s fruit and seeds, sun and water, a sense of passing time; everything just slightly on the turn or poignantly past its best. Cue The Tears and the quiet delirium of One Love mix up the processes required for love with those needed for photosynthesis, while Love Died In Our Arms hits Birnam Wood for the full Macbeth (“A little water/Is sure to clear us of this”). “Autumn’s touch/Harvest worn/Winter’s grasp beckons us on,” she sighs on Can You Hear Nature Sing?, part almanac, part Summerisle tour guide.
It’s too pretty to catch the striking daguerreotype expressions of P.J. Harvey’s
White Chalk, a record committed to a similarly vintage sense of unease, but mellotrons, harmoniums, and the elegant Robert Kirbystyle string arrangements (courtesy of Hannah Peel and Lucy Wilkins) change the weather around her. Occasionally, the album strays into mindfulness territory, as much background as the birds. Yet while HeartShaped Scars might not be the first flowering of such wistful folk mysteries, it still brings in a good harvest.