If you can tell your Norahs from your Noras, I can guarantee you’re going to like this. Seductive, smoky and as wilfully vulnerable as bending over for a bar of soap in Borstal’s Reformatory Home For Boys, Rachael Yamagata’s debut EP shows just what might have happened had the late great Jeff Buckley have found himself with an altogether different kind of mojo. The sweet but capable voice swinging smoothly from a whisper to a scream? It’s all there in opening track ‘Collide’. Only this time it’s devoid of all the stagey melodrama and angst of fellow Buckleyanians Matt Bellamy, Martin Grech and James Walsh. And what’s more, it’s a woman!
Second track ‘Known For Years’ begins to redraft a great deal of the gentler ethereal sketches made on Buckley’s posthumous release, ‘Sketches For.. My Sweetheart The Drunk’ by drawing on the slinky, bleeding soulfulness of classic artists like Smokey Robinson and Janis Joplin. ‘Worn Me Down’, on the otherhand, with its addictive, driving break beat and humming chamber-orchestra proves that Rachael is every bit as sexy as she is supple, and every bit as erotic as she is exotic (well I did have to provide a lead into telling you she’s half Japanese, now, didn’t I?)
Produced by Malcolm Burn (of EmmyLou Harris, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith fame) the ‘Rachael Yamagata EP’ is a pretty little sleeping bag of blues and boffing. Market forces may force her up against the likes of Fiona Apple, Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan, but for me at least, this comely oriental wench drills far deeper.