Coming across Gemma Hayes’ debut album Night On My Side was like discovering a room in the house you never knew was there. Cosy, special but unshowy, instantly familiar, it was the absolute sound of home, as surely as if some kind of sonic perfumer had distilled and bottled it.
Of course, much of its incredible warmth and second-by-second magic was arguably down to the musicians, and the producer, and the moment that was in it: some of the most neck-achingly towering figures in Irish music mucked in (Dave and Karl Odlum, Paul Noonan, Colm Mac Con Iomaire), as did the record producer of new weird Americana, Dave Fridmann.
Maybe the very distinction of her collaborators is why, for her second record, Hayes took up her own challenge and ran for miles, just to see what she was made of.
In other words, she dropped everything, moved to Los Angeles and began again with an unknown producer and brand-new band. With weird appositeness, the record sleeve of The Roads Don’t Love You looks like a photo negative of the cover of PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the album Harvey made after upping sticks and moving to New York to outrun her own long shadows.
So how is it? Granted, we may never stop missing the My Country-Muddy Valentine production and general benevolent weirdness Daves F and O once brought.
But thankfully Roads takes us back to what is more or less the same beautiful room, even if someone has maybe taken some of the fairylights down. The gorgeous moments are many: the Stereolab thrum and sparkle of ‘Happy Sad’; the wintery horse-bell jingle and sawdust-soft, heart-scarred come-on of ’Another For The Darkness’; the steely grief and I-can’t-go-on,-I’ll-go-on drumming of ‘Keep Me Here’; the breathless, brilliantly sparkling Sofia-Coppola-rock thrill of ‘Nothing Can’; the zen-cowboy poetry of ‘Horses’. As ever, a kind of weather-beaten, old-soul-in-a-young-body sensibility runs like a current throughout, and even the most polished track is still gratifyingly quasi-scruffy, and more honest than polite, with a telltale scrap of hay in its hair. Still on the good road, so.