Album Review: Joanna Chapman-Smith - Contraries (Woundup Records)

Joanna Chapman-Smith's follow up to her 2007 debut EYRE CORVIDAE takes us on a journey through the contraries in life, taking William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a premise, exploring the polarised opposites of right and wrong, mind and body, good and bad. With a real tangible handle on composition, the young Canadian songwriter incorporates Latin, gypsy jazz and blues influences as a basis to rest these explorations upon and apparently with seamless precision. With a sense of gypsy cabaret and a hint of the burlesque, the compositions on CONTRARIES range from the soulfully emotional to the whimsical, but all with an easily accessible quality.

Whilst A Glass of Right and Wrong takes a quizzical look at relationships through a liquid metaphor, the autobiographical Urbanality, reveals the songwriter's dreams of travel and alternative living, recalling her youth spent scraping a living as an artist between the two cities of Toronto and Vancouver. With no small measure of candor, Joanna's frustrations of being tied to the city reveal an inherent desire to travel and to get away from it all.

Now well travelled, Chapman-Smith has spread her music around from Canada to the US, Europe and New Zealand, delivering tight musical soirées with a pinch of bohemian spirit, armed with a steadily growing repertoire of memorable songs of her own as well as gracing other's albums with her voice and clarinet, such as those by fellow Canadian-based artists CR Avery and Sarah MacDougall. The IMA award-winning Melodies, with its quirky introduction and lilting French accordion/clarinet-led accompaniment, shows Joanna at her most comfortable, with an irresistibly swirling waltz-time dance. The tightly arranged instrumental Klezbian Mother provides a potential soundtrack to a Jewish or Greek wedding, with sprightly clarinet and accordion forcefully duelling at the side of the dance floor; a coda is also provided in the form of Dub Mother, delicately played as the bride and groom leave the party and the guests disperse.

The haunting Between the Minds, has an ethereal quality, largely due to the fragile whistled melody that ties the song together, featuring brothers Tim and Dan Chapman-Smith, providing whistling and vocal duet respectively. If fragility is exemplified in Between the Minds, then melancholy is hinted at in the closing Carnival Song, which laments the passing of time.

Joining Joanna on the album is a fine assembled cast under the guise of The Tryst, comprising Dawn Zoe on accordion, Justine Fischer on bass and Wayne Adams on drums, whilst Joanna takes care of guitar, clarinet and keyboard duties. Futher support comes in the form of Christina Zaenker on cello, Marc L'Esperance on tenor sax and violin with additional vocals by Carolyna Loveless, Sarah MacDougall and Chris Suen.