Carina Round has to be the most vital, stimulating, fluent and inevitable singer in the country right now. Bar none. PJ Harvey, with whom Carina elicits a worthy likeness, may still be regularly whipping up our interest (most recently in association with Josh Holme and a heated stretch in the desert of course), but it wouldn’t be unfair to say that she doesn’t tear the floorboards from under your feet like she used to. You know Polly’s traits and can hear her slinking up these days. Best get a good footing again though. Carina Round crept out of Birmingham two years ago with the stunning ‘First Blood Mystery’, a set of seven songs heavily rooted in classic, mostly American rhythm and blues influences (Dylan, Simone) but delivered by a discordant, wholesome personality magnified many times over by its own sheer power. That appears here, but refined and reinforced and still hopelessly beautiful.
‘Shoot’ opens the door to ‘The Disconnection’, leading you in through badly lit halls, shorting strip-lights and church candles providing a flickering illumination, with the suspicious intensity of something from PJ Harvey’s ‘Stories From The City…’. But these catacombs to which you’re being introduced are yet to get deeper, more disorientating and in your face (‘Into My Blood’), more anecdotal, reflective and accommodating (‘Lacuna’). It’s advisable not to get too comfortable, this is too varied and thrilling a tour for that, like you’ll be pulled through another hole or arch into a new surrounding with little forewarning. You’re never forced though, you need to follow. And she doesn’t force her vivid and urgent tales, it’s just like they were just never meant to remain untold.
To say that she has one of the most intoxicating voices, though undoubtedly true, would actually be a little wide of the mark. She has many many intoxicating voices, a cavernous range of perspectives, and each last one drips with a thick history and distinct emotional lexicon. Just take ‘Motel 74’ as illustration, it’s close and involving enough to make your heart beat a new shape out through your chest. She is a contained diva of her own making, in the eccentric off-centre Tori Amos moulding. Singing bright modern songs with the cutting tingle of Kristen Hersh, but with the classic no-pissing-about rhythmic awareness of Nina Simone. It doesn’t feel like it belongs anywhere, it’s of itself. You have no real choice. You need to hear this. And when you do you will fall in love.