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Album Review: Woman’s Hour ‘Conversations’

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Woman’s Hour, a four piece out of London, are a band that could have never been. It took Fiona Jane Burgess some time to convince her brother Will to bring his guitar over to her place and work out some songs together. In Will’s defense, his apprehension stemmed from the fact that until 2011 he had never heard Fiona sing. Fast forward to 2014 and Woman’s Hour (rounded out by drummer Josh Hunnisett and bassist Nick Graves) have released their first full length, aptly titled Conversations.

From the beginning, Conversations sounds a bit like eavesdropping on a deeply personal conversation between two people either falling in or out of love. The catch being that it’s a phone conversation and you’re only overhearing one side of the story, coming to your own conclusions on the rest of the details. On “Unbroken Sequence,” a dreamy, not quite there wall of sound opens as Fiona Jane sings, in a plaintive voice, a series of somewhat passive aggressive questions that all end with “would it be better for you?”

The passive aggressiveness doesn’t end there. Thankfully, the album doesn’t continue to merely focus on that, either. Conversations is one of those albums that walks you through the various scenes of a relationship that tries and fails and ends triumphantly — or in sobs. “Darkest Place,” with an R&B groove backed by sparse keyboard and synth, seems to focus on the lows, the damaged, and the downright bad times. It is one of my favorite tracks on the album because of it’s willingness to go there. The unexpected interlude brings all of Woman’s Hour’s magic to play in a spaced out, anti-climatic (but still very good) way.

Woman’s Hour could have easily been written off as another “alt” R&B / synth-pop act, but their dedication to creating specific imagery for all of their work reflects otherwise. The album cover for Conversations is said to have been inspired by a photograph accompanying a magazine article titled “The Start of an Era.” On first listen, “Two Sides of You” brought the album cover to the forefront of my mind. The song, both in the title and lyrics, plays with the idea of not knowing a person whole (or being surprised by another side of them); it’s like knowing there’s three sides to a triangle but only being able to see two.

On Conversations, Woman’s Hour have created a simple grayscale universe, and it works well, although the reserved sparseness may linger too long on the surface level of it all. For now, everything looks better in black and white, and it will be interesting if the band’s subsequent releases focus on the things that look worse, using the same confrontational and challenging approach they take with their visuals to their musical output.

Review by Alex Martinez. Follow her on Twitter @xxalexm.



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