After taking a decade-long break from recording music,
Dot Allison returns with the most intimate and sincere-sounding album she's made yet.
Heart-Shaped Scars is almost painfully delicate folk music, recorded in a way that suggests it was all done with young kids sleeping in the next room. This is not the shiny pop chanteuse of her 1999 album
Afterglow, nor is it the icy electroclash singer heard on
We Are Science or the mysterious noir balladeer of Room 7 1/2. The feel of this record comes closest to that of the baroque, almost chamber folk of Exaltation of Larks, but the sounds here are more fragile and close to the bone emotionally.
Allison and her collaborators -- who include co-producer
Fiona Cruickshank and arranger
Hannah Peel -- concoct a magical realm of whispered vocals, angel-soft harmonies, subtle strings, gently struck piano keys, quietly strummed guitars and ukuleles, and then pair them with words that don't just hint at heartbreak but rather spread it on thick like a layer of mercurochrome over a recent wound. Listening to the album is like eavesdropping on a group of people making music for themselves, purging the deepest feelings for no other reason than it's the right thing to do. In that regard,
Heart-Shaped Scars has much in common with the obscure private-press singer/songwriters of the early '70s who sounded slightly out of place and time, yet plugged into the cosmic continuum all the same. It's easy to get carried away with these kinds of thoughts as the album plays and one is transported ever so carefully out of wherever they might be at the time and into
Allison's haunted house of sound and emotion. The quieter tracks like "The Haunted" and "Forever's Not Much Time" take you there on a cloud of sadness as
Allison's vocals guide the way. Slightly more arranged and dramatic songs such as "Constellations" and "Cue the Tears" come complete with drums and the aching quality of a lost
Sandy Denny classics. "One Love" even has the kind of soaring chorus that the best One Dove songs had. They are no less tender though; in fact, the shatteringly gloomy "Constellations" sports the most unvarnished vocal performance of the album as
Allison can barely get the words out. Only the help of the strings and harmonies get her -- and the listener -- through the emotional land mine. Most of the record travels a similar path and it's as lovely as it is sad. In the past,
Allison has felt like something of a musical chameleon searching for a sound that she truly felt invested in and could take full ownership of. With
Heart-Shaped Scars, she's found a home in sparse and spooky folk. Possibly not something one could have predicted when she first arrived on the scene with One Dove, but something that is satisfying and true all the same. ~ Tim Sendra