Precious Soul

Despite professing undying love for blue-eyed country soul, way too many rock and R&B acts gravitating towards the old south for, bizarrely enough, fashion reasons. They go in search of the holy grail and come back laden with embroidered bell bottoms, cowboy boots and Nudie suits – tourists bedazzled by the gimcrack knick-knacks in Beale Street souvenir shops.
Then there’s someone like Bronagh Gallagher, who spent a lifetime listening (listening, the great untrumpeted art) to Motown, Nashville and Stax recordings, an osmotic process that has imbued the singer with immaculately natural phrasing. Case in point: the lovely ‘Believe Me’, where the ease of her delivery is sister morphine’s cool hand on a fevered brow, or ‘He Don’t Love You’, a bald and brutal truth, softly sung.
Elsewhere, the title tune is the kind of devotional gospel Van specialises in, but her spiritual home is several thousand miles due west and then south: Dusty in Memphis, Al Green, Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline (‘Magpies’). These tunes cast Ms Gallagher as holistic therapist bearing chicken soup soul, backed up by a rhythm section nailed firmly to the floor and a guitarist who, notwithstanding the odd Cropper-ism, is on his best behaviour. John D Reynolds’ characteristically empathic production also merits kudos, as do Brian Eno’s glassy string arrangements.
There are one or two loose threads in the material. ‘Fed Up Fantasising’ tends to plod where it should throb, and ‘Johnny Eagle’ is charming at three minutes but trying at five. But a ghost song in waltz time like ‘Too Much Love’ suggests that, as she gains in confidence, Bronagh Gallagher might just vault into the kind of cosmic country occupied by lateral thinkers like Emmylou, Lanois or Mary Margaret O’ Hara.