It’s a classically American record by an American who was an expatriate for half of her young life.
Being the daughter of a globe trotting missionary didn’t give Diana Birch a first hand indoctrination to American culture the way most Americans get it, but she was always a quick study taking up piano at the age of seven, learning to play “by ear,” being able to pick up any tune without needing to see the sheet music. When her preacher father finally relocated his family back to the States (Portland, OR) after stints in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Australia, the 13 year old Diana quickly made up for lost time, quickly sopping up everything from trad jazz and the Beatles to goth and hip-hop. Her wide-eyed take on American and Western popular forms of music has made it easy for her to digest it and convey it through her own compositions with freshness, because it’s fresh to her. Her innate talent gives her the ability to pull it off with the proficiency of an old pro, but she’s in her mid-twenties.
It wasn’t even after she started performing for audiences for a while before another talent of hers became uncovered: her singing. It’s deeply soulful, which is a good thing, because her preferences tend toward soul. It’s so rangy and pliable, playing the game of “she sounds like” for her is a challenging endeavor. Etta James, Carole King, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Chi Coltrane, Natalie Merchant and Amy Winehouse comes to mind at various times, often in the same song, sometimes even in the same line. Just like these legends, she’s got the cadence, phrasing and control. Those pipes are often powerful but never forced.
Eventually, someone with some connections was going to find this rare kind of flair and sign her to a record deal, and that’s just what happened. Helmed by the same production team who brought us Joss Stone’s first album (Steve Greenberg, Betty Wright and Mike Mangini), the trio got Birch in a studio last year and produced a collection of all-originals that came out in May, Bible Belt.
Bible Belt, tracked in both New York City and New Orleans, features a bevy of great supporting musicians like George Porter, Jr., Stanton Moore, Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Cindy Blackman (Lenny Kravitz), and crack horn players including klezmer-jazz trumpet luminary Frank London, for starters. The mixture of players from both big music towns helps to give the record the toughness of the Big Apple and the laid-back festiveness of the Big Easy.
But make no mistake, this album rests on the musical personality of one Ms. Birch. She a handles all the lead vocals and much of the backing vocals (along with Wright), and played keyboards. And, she wrote the songs, she wrote the songs.
Sure, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a thread of old soul that runs throughout the whole set, but each song is this artist’s own personal interpretation of a form of classic American and British popular music style, or a melding of several of these styles. Nearly all of them armed with big, radio-ready hooks.
“Fire Escape” is the softest tune of the album, but it’s where the album begins. It’s a majestic, string-laden tune that harkens back to the early sixties soul of Etta James, with a touch of Patsy Cline country. Birch belts it with conviction, and the arrangement of the strings with the horns and organ is done without any flaws. “Valentino” is Birch’s snappy kiss-off to childhood fantasies kept buoyant by second-line chock-block percussion and a charming, woo-woo backing chorus. “Fools” brings the focus to early seventies singer-songwriter territory, a domain ruled largely by Carole King.
King’s influence is felt even stronger on the next track “Nothing But But A Miracle” (see video below), which starts with a pastel introduction of the melody on a soft electric piano, before the driving piano takes over. It’s a song that flows naturally, like all good pop songs do, but it’s Birch’s vocal delivery that puts it over the top. It’s a song about heartache, but the lyrics alone don’t tell you that. Her rendering of the second verse singing in hurried and stuttered phrasing brings out the desperation and confusion of love just lost just as much as the words she sings.
“Rewind” is not the “Rewind” of Paolo Nutini, but this soulful lament draws from many of the same ingredients Nutini uses for his own songs. “Rise Up” is one of Birch’s more overtly gospel tunes, something that she’s been familiar with from her worldly travels as a child. And yet, there’s a New Orleans jazz horn arrangement lurking in the background. “Photograph” is an offspring of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman,” but with a organ-led church chorus tacked on the end.
Birch takes on country balladry with “Mirror Mirror.” “Ariel” is a missing track from Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection, or least it sure sounds that way. “Choo Choo” applies some more that gospel with that classic Motown sound and cleverly layered background vocals. The album wraps up with a couple of slower numbers (“Foregiveness,” “Magic View”), where the record finally starts to run out of gas as Birch is beginning to retread ground she’s covered better elsewhere.
Nonetheless, Bible Belt is a pretty impressive debut overall for this precocious talent. Diane Birch didn’t set out to forge new kinds of music, but she’s done a nice job recasting music that’s new to her. The throwback angle might not assure her Mariah Carey-level success, but Stone and Nutini hadn’t done so bad mining this vein. There’s no reason why Birch shouldn’t, either.
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