Georgia Knight – Beanpole (13th Floor Album Review)
From the opening chords, Beanpole, the debut album from Georgia Knight, is something special. For starters, how many writers play autoharp as their central instrument?
Hailing from Naarm/Melbourne and now NZ-based, Knight weaves threads of melody and lyrical lines that are at times fragile and at others high-intensity. And always evocative.
Opening track Fix My Car is breathy and weightless but rapidly succumbs to an orchestral-scaled rhythm and back again. Knight’s voice is delivered as if down a telephone line but then rises to a crescendo of sonic emotion. Stunning for its oscillation between the delicate and clamorous.
Next track, City Gone to Seed has all the attention to urban life Courtney Barnett achieves. But this is a quieter meditation. An appreciation to detail in which the rough guitar strums are perfect accompaniment to suggest the rhythms of neighbourhood and tidal pulse of ordinary lives. The late-in-the-song piano is a brilliant twist, like raindrops watering the feral cityscape.
Not Bad At All offers a rockier beat, picking up the pace into a funkier exploration of the writer’s place-in-the-word. Backing voices add an ethereal wavering sense of oscillation between doubt and confidence.
I am looking to start fresh/I am looking to start anew. So begins Mingle. Synthesiser, drumbeat. I covet your smile/I covet your touch. A yearning for connection. Let’s mingle/I have singing in my head. I am the cushion/ you are the pin. Resonant lyrics set to a persuasive beat. This is the album’s haunting centrepiece that has me pushing replay.
A mini-drum solo open Rockabilly. Loose-strung guitar chords cut in. A mildly frantic pace with Knight’s voice adding urgency. So distinctive I want to shy away from comparisons, but if pressed would suggest hints of Sharon Van Etten.
Desire gives title to the yearning theme and this track sees Knight’s voice shoot up and down an impressive range. Drumming seeks to take the listener through and out to the other side of the song. Again, an urgency and something plaintive but strong. There’s an emotional palette here whose shades unfurl into visibility with repeat listens.
Everyone Knows My Business Now is another delicate narrative where the haiku-like complaint of the title is clothed in complex instrumentation. Intermittently Knight’s lone and lost-sounding voice returns with an unsettling power. A fusion of poetry and instrumentation that has me thinking Julia Jacklin.
Last track Cut You Loose returns Knight’s autoharp to centre stage. A bookend song to the opening Fix My Car. An almost-wail set against the wall of high-pitched strum. An ensemble of other instruments adds clamour to the crescendo of the words I gotta cut you loose.
And so, a mere eight tracks later, we the listeners are cut loose, autoharp strums echoing in synch with Knights’ plaintive vocals. And, as her engaging set opening for Folk Bitch Trio at the Tuning Fork showed, these songs translate into live performance well.
This collection stands high like the beanpole of its title. A truly original and full-of-feeling album in an otherwise crowded field of singer-songwriters.
Robin Kearns
Beanpole is out now
