Krystle Warren is a remarkable, if complicated lady. Taking time off from extensive tours with Rufus Wainwright, she is briefly back in the UK to promote what is surely one of the best albums of the year, the ponderously titled Love Songs – A Time You May Embrace. Her versatile backing band were billed as the Faculty; they are not the musicians who play on the album, but classy session players who work in the British bluegrass band, the Wagon Tales. Their acoustic lineup included banjo, fiddle, mandolin and brass, and they dressed like a country outfit. But this was no predictable country set, even though Warren matched their look, wearing denim and a cap: her songs are as unpredictable as her rambling and witty introductions.
Born in Kansas, Warren manages to fuse almost every American style, from country and folk to soul and jazz, in emotional songs that veer constantly between the familiar and the unexpected. To this she adds a powerful voice that can switch from deep and husky, to sections where she suddenly climbs an octave or two, sounding like an entirely different singer. At different times in the set there were echoes of Nina Simone and singer-songwriters from Tracy Chapman to Joan Armatrading.
She started with Tuesday Morning, a blend of folk balladry and swing, then picked up a banjo for the upbeat and jazzy Five Minutes Late, and treated William Blake’s The Clod and the Pebble to a new setting, as a crooned country ballad. Then she gave a preview of her next, more gloomy Love Songs album: a weepie country blues, Sadness is a Good Thing; an epic and melodic pop anthem with a folky edge, Forever is a Long Time; and covers that included Gene Clark’s Out on the Side. It was a gloriously original set.
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