For a decade now, Nerina Pallot’s genre-defying tunes (soft soul? alternative torch?) have come dangerously close to breaking her into the big time. While most songwriters of her ilk have no desire to share a space on the charts with Jessie J and Bruno Mars, the Jersey native has never been coy about her musical ambitions. In 2006, a 31 year-old Nerina even told the London Times that she had planned to have a record go multi-platinum by the age of 24.
As you may have gathered, this still hasn’t happened for Pallot, even if the campaign has taken her through three major record labels and seen her pen tunes for miniature pop diva Kylie Minogue and the slightly less credible but also quite minuscule Diana Vickers. The 36 year-old’s career is far from lagging (she has an Ivor Novello award and a Brit), but it seems like the longer she spends in this business, the more hopeless her case becomes.
On Year Of The Wolf, things are pushed to rather grandiose heights. Someone, whether it’s producer Bernard Butler, songwriter husband Andy Chatterly or Pallot herself, has clearly decided that skyscraping strings are the answer to every musical pickle. This gung-ho approach to songwriting only sometimes pays off (‘If I Lost You Now’ is truly gorgeous, while the lofty harp solo at the end of ‘All Bets Are Off’ is just plain puzzling) but for the most part, Year Of The Wolf is a fiery collection of intimate, personal (the wolf of the title refers to her son, Wolfgang) and beautifully-formed songs.
She strikes gold with ‘I Do Not Want What I Do Not Have’, co-written by ex-Four Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry (she who penned Christina’s ‘Beautiful’ and Pink’s ‘Get The Party Started’) and the fusion of marching drums and xylophone on ‘I Think’ packs an undeniable punch.
But despite being her best record yet, this is not the vehicle to slingshot Pallot into the mainstream. No mind. For the people who do give Year Of The Wolf the time, the last thing they’ll find in Pallot’s voice is doom.