Review: Gretchen Peters, Glasgow Arches
Peters has explained that the album is the creative fruit of a combined annus mirabilis/horribilis back in 2010, during which she got married (to her longtime pianist Barry Walsh), learned that her son was transgender, lost a friend of 30 years to suicide and was afflicted by wider disasters both man-made and natural.
The material’s slow ripening – into what’s been widely hailed as a career-best recording – was evident firstly in that none of it directly addressed any of the above experiences, instead eloquently reflecting the soul-searching and re-evaluation they prompted, and the eventual acceptance that “life is still a beautiful disaster”, as she put it in one of the new tracks, the gospel-tinged Dark Angel. Starting with its title track, Hello Cruel World – performed in its entirety here – finds richly fertile ground in such double-edged yet ultimately affirmative sentiments, often via deftly imagined characters and metaphors, like the narrator whose “complicated” lover is eponymously symbolised in The Matador, or the circus knife-thrower’s assistant in Woman on the Wheel. Five Minutes and Camille were empathetic portraits of women near despair, both studies in plainspoken yet poetic economy, while Idlewild stunningly captured the past/present perspective of recollected childhood vignettes. Peters’ compelling wordcraft was matched by equally seasoned delivery - understated yet trenchant, husky yet honeyed, and vividly articulated.
Rating: ****