We all know what to expect of the bittersweet folksy blues pursuit; love, like anything else subject to our cruel whim, is to be drawn out and rewrought in a mimetic frenzy of acoustic guitar, plaintive vocals and tear-jerking harmonies. In a Fiona Apple kind of way, the dulcet Buckley is another lady who’s mistaken a paper bag for a dove.
Offering her reflections on love to the swelling ranks of her (no doubt collegiate) fan base, in ‘Into Your Arms’ Buckley sings about “Searching… for her gallant knight” and the like. Some anachronistic pastoral images of hanging out under trees with your lover are constructed around the always relevant themes of looking for love, happiness, and the culmination of your dreams, and as with all good songwriting ‘Into Your Arms’ is romantic while maintaining its integrity.
Some decidedly Beth Gibbons sounding vocals pervade many of the songs, not in an imitative way so much as being pleasantly familiar to the listener in their slow, lazy, sensual delivery, like in ‘If You Follow’, ‘So Free’ and ‘Honeysuckle’, where Buckley’s beautiful voice does justice to her evocative lyrics.
‘Whirlwind’ follows up the oft synthy ‘So Free’ with minimalist piano and nostalgic violin, and features the lines, “I realised you never knew me at all. It was a whirlwind with you” – another paean to unrequited love or rather the kind that is stifled before it has a chance to realise itself.
The bluesy ‘Grey Love’ – “the colours of the rainbow was the dream I had with you/But you took my heart and you broke it down” – is a serious affair, but is no less elegant and quietly beguiling. “The love I have for you makes me so damn grey” goes the funereal ending. We all know what to expect of girls who sing about love like this, it’s usually a cry for help from the ones who need it least of all.