Ashes smacks of a lack of effort. The songwriting is not exceptional in any sense of the word, the delivery of the material is average to the point of tedium, the production feels unfinished and uncared for and influences aren’t so much worn upon the artists sleeve as they seem to constitute the entirety of the clothing.
Seemingly, the entire reason behind the existence of Kyla La Grange as a musician is that she is easily marketable. When Florence and the Machine are such a huge commercial and critical hit, you can bet that half of the world’s record company executives have “Quirky, faux-gothic, female singer-songwriter” written somewhere in their three-dimensional marketing synergy matrix-thing. So, when Kyla La Grange comes along and is described as the next Florence Welch, it’s easy to see why a huge record deal would practically throw itself at her. Hype and the media attention should quickly follow, and the results end up plastered across the record stores of our nation like the symptoms of a gloomy, art-student-ish virus.
As a result, La Grange comes across as a bad impression of last summer’s sensation. Kate Bush-esque vocal flourishes feel unnatural, almost copied and pasted into tracks. Backing vocals sound like drones rather than choirs, and instrumentation is similarly uninspired. The production is rough around the edges in all the wrong ways, with unbalanced audio and poor volume control. More fundamentally, La Grange lacks what made Florence Welch so appealing – the voice. Whilst La Grange certainly has an admirable voice, all too often it is kept to a stagey whisper or relegated to the bottom of the mix. This prevents La Grange from belting it out, as Florence does.
Perhaps I’m judging this rather too harshly by comparing it to Florence and the Machine. It could be the case that Kyla La Grange is an original artist with her own direction and ideas. The unfortunate conclusion that follows from this is that these ideas and that direction just aren’t all that compelling. The album isn’t bad; it just isn’t very good. It’s the product (in the full commercial sense of the term) of too much style and too little substance. But it makes decent background music.
TWO STARS
