Marian Bradfield: “Tonight Is Just For Us” (Tandem Records)

Whereas Marian swept the listener away in waves of emotion and unbridled passion, Tonight Is Just For Us is a much more studied and technically accomplished affair than its predecessor. To begin with the production is better and gives a richer musical texture within which she can weave her vocal spells all the more rapturously. Her singing is more nuanced yet more cautious and more correct. In the best possible senses, Tonight Is Just For Us is more detached and more restrained, more intellectual.

Paradoxically, the emotional effect of such dispassion can often be extremely chilling. A good example of this can be best seen on the opening ‘Little White Lies’, a melancholy melody about lost love and the resultant sad acceptance of its surrogates. The penultimate number ‘What Will I Do With Our Dreams’ also showcases the touching strength of stoicism. It’s about the disintegration of a marriage and the internal monologue the woman has with herself as she decides what to keep and what to give away of she and her ex-husband’s material possessions. The final verse almost ends up being a list of his and hers and this non-judgmental emphasis on mundane detail renders the theme of break-up all the more heartbreaking.

There’s a lot of history and experience in Bradfield’s larynx as well. The termination of lovers’ relationships appear to have a more emphatic and heart-rending finality to them. Often, the characters who people Marian’s songs are well past the fickle stages of reckless love. Then again, as on ‘I Let Him Go’ the main protagonists in Ms Bradfield’s tunes are trapped in a safer, more conventional existence while privately they yearn for a past they didn’t, at that time, have the courage to seize.

At times Tonight Is Just For Us sounds like the album of a woman reluctant to make the ultimate sacrifice of her self and her sanity in order to reach the zenith of her creative powers. Her disinclination to do so is wholly understandable. However, audiences almost as a rule demand that their heroes in some way or another burn at the stake.

Marian Bradfield is hot, very hot but she doesn’t burn for her art like, say, Iris De Ment or Victoria Williams. It’ll be interesting to see just how far she’s willing to go down the road of wrack and ruin in order to further the boundaries of her considerable talent. Or will she do an about turn and start to play it safe? Tonight Is Just For Us leaves these questions tantalisingly hanging in the balance.

• Patrick Brennan