O, Devotion

This fabulous album isn’t easy to categorise. At times it sounds like low-key folk with an ethereal touch. At other moments it suggests the work of a melancholic chanteuse in a French café. Occasionally there’s a hint of New Orleans jazz. And then there are the moments where it sounds like it’s by a female, less growly Tom Waits.
No, you can’t pigeonhole singer-songwriter Liz Green. This dazzling debut album appears three years after her last single, and she’s clearly spent the time honing her skills. She seems equally comfortable singing stark folk songs accompanied by nothing but her own finger-picked guitar and crooning chansons, over a jazzy piano line. The arrangements are pared down and all the more effective for it. Some of the songs, such as the jazzy ‘The Quiet’, have a boisterous swagger but there’s a tinge of melancholy running through even the livelier numbers. After ‘The Quiet’’s jaunty brass section subsides, Green fades away while forlornly singing “It’s all I know…”
There are moments on this album when Green sounds a little like the underrated singer-songwriter Nancy Elizabeth, others when you can hear the ghost of Billie Holiday, but mostly she sounds like no one but herself. “I want to be a French singer,” Green sings on ‘French Singer’, but she doesn’t need to dream of being anyone else. Being Liz Green is more than enough.