Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magical treat..., 12 Jun 2007
When The Guardian puts a new artist on the front cover you can do two things. 1) be suspicious that some corporate label is doing some overblown marketing campaign or 2) take it seriously as an artist to investigate.
finding out that Stephanie Dosen is signed to Bella Union-home to Midlake, Fionn Regan, The Dears and Howling Bells- i felt fairly safe that no. 2 was the best option!! and how right i was...
Stephanie Dosen has to have the most beautiful and affecting voice i have heard since Cat Power. While Stephanie's delivery is more classy than Chan Marshall's, they share that unnerring ability to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up...This Joy is a gorgeous opener and two minutes in to the album, i was sold...Other standout tracks Only Getting Better, Like A Dream, Owl in the Dark and the closer title track A Lily For The Spectre have that thread of melancholia running through them and the final track in particular has a spine-tingling moment where Dosen sounds like thom yorke in his prime, wrenching every drop of emotion out of her delicate frame. Dont be fooled. Stephanie may be a very pretty woman and she may be filed under 'singer-songwriter' in this pigeon-hole image-conscious world, but this album is a stunning debut with dark and brooding moments that balance the softer, sadder songs. An artist who will be here long after the cynics have gone.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'Just the right balance between etheral and accessibility', 24 Aug 2007
It was the sentence above, which I have used for the title of my review, that made me throw caution to the wind and buy this album without having heard any of the tracks. Quite a risk in some ways, as obviously only good things are going to appear on the front of album covers to entice people to part with their hard earned cash. But this whim has really paid off.
Stephanie's voice is superb. Breathy but not irritatingly so. She has also written the majority of the songs - only "Lakes of Canada" was penned by someone else, with "Owl in the Dark" and "Death and the Maiden" written in colloboration with another.
And her lyrics are very good. On the front of the album cover, there were referemces to comparisons between Dosen and Kate Bush; personally, I think this is only justified in relation to the 'strange' qualities of some of her lyrics. Dosen has a far more pleasant voice than Bush, and her music is definitely more accessible than Bush's. But with lyrics like "And if I'm just an owl in the dark / searching in the stars", you can quickly see where such Bush echoes may lie.
"This Joy", the opening track and the first single, is lovely. It sets the tone for the album, making you feel as though there is some kind of magic to her work.
One of my favourite opening lines comes in "Vinalhaven Harbor", it cannot help but grab your attention completely -
"When I was young / I had a dark heart inside of me / my dreams fell upon / a pillow of crow feathers I slept on. . ."
Despite the sense of dark, the rest of the song lightens up to a degree. I get the sense that it is about someone she has lost, someone she cared about a great deal. But the lightness is there, as she describes that the person is still with her.
"Only getting Better" is another fantastic song. It is one of the more uptempo tracks, although it still remains quite subdued. Stephanie seems to be very good at creating a constricted frenzy - by this I mean that her voice never breaks, never falters and never really reaches that point where you think it may. Although her songs are not raging crescendoes, this is not neseccarily a bad thing.
"Owl in the Dark" is also one of my favourite tracks. As mentioned, it is perhaps one of the songs which showcases Stephanie's lyrical talent as bordering in the abtsract, but it is testament to her songwriting talent that she does not turn it into a completely inaccessible piece. Rather, it comes across as a love song with a magical touch, as her unique imagery teases different reactions from your own imagination.
My main gripe with the album, and the reason I have not given it the full 5 star rating, is that the songs do have a tendency to blur into one. The tone, tempo and style of them are all very similar - "Only Getting Better" is the fatest any of the songs become. Given that this is a debut however, such an oversight can be forgiven. As another reviewer said, I remain interested in thinking about what her second and third album shall bring us.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enchanting, 31 Jul 2007
According to the blurb at least, Stephanie Dosen's musical talent was first brought to bear when she wrote lullabies for swans and foxes on the peacock farm where she was raised (and that's before we've got to the "Stephanie composed songs for boys at school and now mostly writes for ghosts gone astray" section of the blurb...).
So far, so "kooky" then for the folk songstress. Of course it wasn't the said animals that signed her up to some George Orwell influenced record label, but former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde, who not only signed her up but was heavily involved in creating the musical backdrops for this album.
And it really is something quite special indeed.
Dosen has a positively enchanting voice, both beautiful and poetic, which immediately takes this out of the ordinary scheme of things.
The album isn't without faults; by the time you get to the last, and title track, you're aware that there's nothing too dissimilar to the brilliant opener This Joy and also that there's nothing that quite matches up to the magic of it either. You might also find yourself thinking that Dosen is a little too impossibly sweet and that you can't wait for that third album when she's goes for a darker sound. But the fact that I'm sat here already thinking about what her third album sounds like should tell you all you need to know.
Stephanie Dosen is quite the talent and I hope she's around for many years to come. Even with it's "faults" this is an enchanting album.
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