(Indie Pop / Easy Listening) Sarah Nixey - Brave Tin Soldiers - 2011, MP3 (tracks), 320 kbps

Sarah Nixey is best known as the singer in Black Box Recorder. Whilst working as a backing vocalist for the folk band Balloon, Nixey stumbled upon the reprobates John Moore (ex Jesus & Mary Chain drummer) and Luke Haines (ex The Auteurs frontman), also in the bands line up at that time. Moore and Haines approached Nixey with an idea for a band, writing a letter promising to make her famous. Given their lack of previous chart success, Nixey was amused and immediately took up their offer.
The enigmatic three piece appeared at the start of 1998 and released four massively acclaimed albums. Their debut, brutish and bleak, England Made Me spawned the single Child Psychology, banned from national radio because it contained the chorus “Life is unfair/kill yourself or get over it”. This was possibly the first anti-Britpop record. The follow-up entitled The Facts Of Life dealt with similar themes – love, sex and death – and saw the band performing the Top Twenty title track on Top Of The Pops. The Worst of Black Box Recorder, a collection of b-sides and unreleased material preceded the band’s urbane 2003 album, Passionoia. A final statement was issued just prior to the 2010 UK general election stating “on Thursday 6 May, Black Box Recorder go to the country for the last time”. After two sell out gigs at The Luminaire and one last bow at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, the band released Do You Believe In God? and Keep It In The Family.
As the Trojan horse of one of the most fascinating and compelling pop bands of recent years, Nixey’s detached sensuality and Jane Birkin-esque vocals played beautifully upon the juxtaposition of safety and horror.
In 2007 Nixey released her first solo album Sing, Memory, produced by James Banbury for the boutique label ServiceAV. The songs are modern tales of poison-pen letter writers, dysfunctional relationships, disappearances, secret love affairs and city life, providing the ideal contemporary pop backdrop for Nixey’s distinctive, Queen’s English voice. Whilst BBR songs are often about characters stranded without navigation tools, this album occasionally offers an exit route. The Singles The Collector, Strangelove, When I’m Here With You and The Black Hit of Space were released to great reviews (MSN, Playlouder, Stylus Magazine, Drowned in Sound, Popjustice etc.). The Collector made it to the main XFM playlist, whilst the third single When I’m Here With You reached national radio. Nixey followed the album with a cover of Françoise Hardy’s Le Temps De L’Amour backed by Ici Avec Toi, a gauloised-up translation of the dreamily romantic When I’m Here With You.
More recently Nixey has written and produced a new album, Brave Tin Soldiers, with the emphasis being on the narrative of the song. Lush piano, string and choral arrangements envelop her vocal, revealing family secrets, erotic entanglements and tragic love stories. This will be released via Black Lead Records in May 2011.
http://www.sarahnixey.com/
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Sarah Nixey will never be as famous as Lady Gaga or as ubiquitous as Katy Perry. She will never need to wear a dress made of meat, or belly flop into a giant birthday cake. What she does is quiet, understated and elegant; as polished as a beautifully cut diamond, but worn discreetly. Having tied-up business with Black Box Recorder, she has at last found the perfect setting for her songs. Where popular music's very own Andy Gray & Richard Keys cast her as a precocious, sinister ice-maiden who could make the phone book read like The Story of O, Brave Tin Soldiers reveals her to be something else entirely: a warm, connected, exceptional musician and songwriter.
Brave Tin Soldiers is written, arranged and produced by Sarah Nixey. She has made a truly accomplished record that is lyrically, melodically and sonically outstanding. It’s nearest comparisons are perhaps Hope Sandoval – if she moved out of her indie comfort zone; a similar stillness and intensity is present in Julee Cruise, again dreamlike, ethereal, yet strong and perhaps even heroic, and lastly, the most dangerous comparison of all, intelligent music’s holy grail, Kate Bush. It’s not just the very Englishness of Sarah’s songs that suggest this affinity. Musical similarities exist in her arrangements, such as vocal layering and harmonising. Sarah has an exquisite and instantly recognisable voice, soothing, seductive, warm and effortless, and a natural gift for melody. She works in her own time, combining the privacy of domesticity (she is the mother of two young children), with the adventure of writing. For her, work is always a pleasure.
The eleven songs of Brave Tin Soldiers are atmospheric, minutely observed tales of love and yearning, and vivid depictions of past lives swathed in luxurious melodies that rise like ectoplasm to haunt the imagination. Taken in its entirety, Brave Tin Soldiers is a highly skilled and effective piece of work, rich in artistry, texture and colours. To the casual listener and MP3 downloader, it also contains several great singles, most obviously, its eponymous track, but also the up-tempo dance-floor filler Love Gets Dangerous, and the heartbreaking yet beautiful murder ballad Gathering Shadows. Perhaps the strangest songs on the album are Silent Hour, referencing as it does the tragic series of teenage-suicides in the Welsh town of Bridgend, and Cat’s Cradle, which tells of a woman with a clear case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Some of these songs have been inspired by personal stories and some have been investigations into infamous stories. After visiting Betty Corrigall’s grave, possibly the loneliest in the UK, on the remote Isle of Hoy in Orkney, Sarah wrote Black Rose, conjuring the ghostly presence of this poor ostracised woman. Elsewhere the album deals with erotic entanglements where fine stockings ladder all too easily, alcohol as the mistress in a broken marriage and, inspired by Samantha Morton’s semi-autobiographic film The Unloved, a young girl who goes home after a stretch in residential care but realises she can’t stay. Bleak as some of this subject matter is, Nixey handles it with absolute restraint and empathy. Even in the darkest moments of an extraordinary, powerful record, it is never depressing, just superbly thoughtful.
http://www.sarahnixey.com/brave-tin-soldiers/
http://www.blackleadrecords.com/BLR/HQ.html
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