Snapshots

Snapshots, is Eleanor McEvoy's best album thus far. She hasn't dropped her interest in the quagmires that are relationships. However, there's a new wisdom and detachment in evidence here. Meanwhile, the guitar and the violin have been supplanted by the piano and sampler so that her vocals shine through more convincingly, and are wrapped up in a sound which is richer, yet more circumspect.

Some of the songs here are wonderful. 'To One Who Didn't Know You' is terrifically low key, yet it manages to communicate the suppressed pain of seeing someone you once loved falling apart. It's the irrefutable confirmation that there's a greater maturity in Eleanor's songwriting.

The addition of producer Rupert Hine (Stevie Nicks and Tina Turner), and backing that has more to do with modern dance grooves like hip-hop and trip-hop than rock or folk, all mean that McEvoy is less burdened by the earnestness of the singer-songwriter idiom. Electronic music creates its own ironic distance.

McEvoy is moving away, too, from the more explicit, introspective style. This results in less chances of hearing Eleanor's often embarrassingly honest and bare-naked confessions about the failure of love and the companionship of alcohol. On the other hand, her greater curiosity about what's going on around her leads to the best song on Snapshots, 'Sophie'. The subject is that of a girl suffering from a serious case of anorexia nervosa.

Eleanor McEvoy has struggled at times to escape from the misconceptions that have attended her career to date. Snapshots will finally put paid to all that. On the opening melody, Eleanor McEvoy sings that there's "more to this woman than a woman's heart". At last, we can believe her.

Unequivocally.