Album Review: Wallis Bird, Home

Some musicians go to Berlin, embrace the darkness, and develop a debilitating smack habit. Never an artist to conform to stereotypes, Bird has had a very different experience: she’s come out of the closet and apparently found true love and happiness in the arms of a good woman.

Encompassing a vast range of musical styles and moods, pretty much all eleven songs on Home– from joyous opener ‘Change’ to the gloriously serene ‘Seasons’ - chart the course of that relationship and celebrate that love. As she has said herself, “Architect was the blueprint to this great life and musical plan I was hatching: ‘girl meets girl, girl falls in love, and happy ending ensues’. Home is the happy ending!”

An entire album of songs about love and happiness could easily grate, but Bird mixes it all up quite brilliantly. The heartfelt title track is directly addressed to her lover and is sung acapella in sean-nós style: “All I ever wanted was to settle down and marry/Laugh and love and hopefully have a child/ Have our families surround us/ Friendships that never die/ Well, we can try, we can try, we can try…”

Later in the same song she sings, “I’m not good for you right now – I’m good for you forever/ There’s so much to you that makes me turn the page.” If Home is a concept album of sorts, it’s also an opportunity for Bird to showcase her impressive mastery of a wide range of vocal and musical styles, as she effortlessly segues from rock to folk to pop to R&B. She goes all Bonnie Tyler on ‘ODOM’ – even singing, “A total eclipse – I’ve forgotten my name.” ‘Control’ is a foot-stomper straight from the Florence Welsh school of screech: “I don’t want to control you/ that is not what I mean/ Cos at the heart of it/ You own what I need.”

Even the downbeat tracks are strangely uplifting. The ambient ‘Pass The Darkness’ is an ethereal mood piece in which she simply sings two lines, “Pass the darkness/into the light…oooooooooOOooooooo.”

She leaves the listener in no doubt that she’s truly in love on ‘I Want It, I Need It’: “Now it’s you, it’s me/ I’m so unbelievably lucky.” It closes joyously with ‘Seasons’: “Girl if it wasn’t for you/ right now I’d be stranded, abandoned, a white wash/ Now these feelings are brand new/ A veil has been lifted/ I’m covered in new colours/ Seasons get moving from red to blue/ Always repeating something new/ No, nothing’s predictable about you.”

Wonderfully eclectic and unpredictable, Home is easily Wallis Bird’s most accomplished album to date. Is it wrong of me to hope that her relationship doesn’t last? True love is all very well, but a break-up album would be really great.