Talk about finding a diamond in the rough, a winning scratchcard you don’t recall buying in your back pocket, or the love of your life at a Hard-Fi gig (ok, possibly we have gone too far). Scout Niblett has proved herself over the course of four albums, even with the best will in the world on the part of the listener, to be an experience somewhat akin to conducting dentistry with a plastic ‘spork’. Her art has at points consisted simply of the wilful abuse of a drum-kit with fragmented stanzas screeched deliriously over the top, starkness in excelsis – even on occasions that she veers towards the palatable, offering soft contemplation, this ethos still reigns. And yet she possesses qualities that turn her off-beat catharsis strangely and irrefutably hypnotic. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the anaesthetic.
Nothing she’s done previously though prepared us for ‘Kiss’. Put plainly, she’s not once prior to now recorded anything so coherently, so heart-piercingly beautiful. And that’s genuine beauty, not the sort that you have to squint to discover. The kind of beauty that suspends all else. And who did it take to bring this out of her? Will ‘Bonnie Prince Billy’ Oldham. Yes, indeed. The wonky monarch of lo-fi melancholy ambles around under his breath and just below the song’s soulful alt-Motown equator, she quivers above it trying to contain her emotions and together they – to coin a cliché that is only a fraction wide of the mark – become a complimentary whole. They are delicious together, taking the aged standard of the double-lead girl/boy love song and scuffing and misshaping it enough to make it entirely believable. Cat Power should watch her back. If we were inclined in such ways we might shed a tear for its tenderness.
Elsewhere she’s true to her established character, with ‘Moon Lake’ you’re back in the dentist’s chair, her urging you to take another swig of the brandy for your own good as she chops out shonky beats in the corner. But largely the album’s made of firmer stuff. ‘Nevada’, ‘Your Last Chariot’ and ‘Let Thine Heart Be Warned’ with their hearty high-key vocals, raw guitar and punchy stuttered percussion use unrefined inspiration siphoned directly from PJ Harvey’s early body of work. And there are yet more collaborations with the Bonnie Prince too; the mournful string laden ‘River Of No Return’ and the gentle reverb-heavy strokes of ‘Comfort You’ are both divine, precious, delicate, even if not as overwhelmingly smitten as ‘Kiss’. She’s still as scruffy, scrappy and a little cross-eyed, but this time she’s wearing a diamond tiara too. From time to time it really catches the light.