Devine and Griffiths

When the most addictive, most extraordinary, most emotionally engaging records emerge, they often seem to come from nowhere. They arrive fully formed, their own world, inviting you to join them. Their defining quality is their open handed generosity. Once heard, they leave the listener with a feeling not dissimilar to the memory of falling in love. Such is the case with ‘Wheels To Get To Heaven’ – a record that, as if from nowhere, can easily stand comparison with an entire lineage of classic releases. To narrow the field, this is a record that sits in the same emotional and musical league as the third release from The Velvet Underground, the first album by The Smiths, Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’, Nico’s ‘The Chelsea Girls’, Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ or Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court and Spark’.

And how to justify such a grand claim? It all comes back to the music, and the world opened up by the music. Great pop tunes derive from a seeming lightness of touch. Attempt to analyze that lightness and you’ll probably find a collision of ideas that shouldn’t work, on paper, but once heard creates something rare and bewitching. ‘Wheels To Get To Heaven’ is a near perfect conflation of darkness and light: that such enchanting, mesmeric songs make eloquent not simply such sadness, but such heartfelt vulnerability to the curves and ragged edges of seemingly commonplace days. In many ways, the greatness of this record lies in its generational significance: here, perhaps, in the lobby of the twenty first century is the first record to articulate the emotional consequences of punk – that volatile, darkling, cultural force that shaped the destiny of so many whom it touched. As such, ‘Wheels To Get To Heaven’ performs a musical audit upon its generation. These seeming love songs, with all the sweetness of love songs, look back to survey an age through the metaphor of relationships: the personal becomes political, the local becomes universal. So what do you get? ‘Wheels To Get To Heaven’ is musically based around a beguiling tension between delicacy and luxuriance. From the drumbeat of the opening track, so neatly curled into sensuousness by the warmest, richest of guitar lines, these are songs that are utterly unashamed in their use of beauty to enchant. This beauty is knowing, but never arch – it’s a refinement of pop’s sweetness, in which – and here is the brilliance – is held a suspension of extraordinary emotional maturity. Amanda Griffiths has a voice that is at once intimate, questioning, boyish, detached, confrontational, seductive, confessional and weighed down with the plangency of pure charm. Its power derives from restraint; its softness becomes its greatest strength. The murmur of Devine’s backing vocal becomes the Shadow of not just the songs, but their performance – the intensity of which is both church-like in its stillness and rich with the emotional resonance of the violet hour.

What else? You could talk about post-punk, avant-cocktail, French jazz, folk rock, pure pop and none of the labels will really get close. Like all great records, ‘Wheels To Get To Heaven’ defines its own territory – a place between love songs and an elegy for lost hope. But still, but still – this is a release that intoxicates with joyous, irresistible songs. 

Michael Bracewell, September 2007