Gravel & Wine http://www.fishpond.com.au/Music/Gravel-Wine-Gin-Wigmore/0602527876160

Artist: Gin Wigmore

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• Gin Wigmore is already a huge star in her native New Zealand, but she is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, although she has what it takes to go international, possessing gorgeous blonde good looks, and her songs are full of sharp observations about the often downside of love and lust, with arrangements that sound big and huge and are built for a superstar on a grand stage, and she knows full well that the way there heads out to the dancefloor. Her songs sound huge, spunky, and feisty, and in some ways she's the midnight dance chanteuse that Britney Spears always seemed to want to be. But then there's Wigmore's voice. It's an acquired taste, really, a kind of near helium-soaked whine that sounds a bit like Billie Holiday, only stripped of Holiday's emotionally weary and elegantly nuanced phrasing. One either accepts Wigmore's voice or one doesn't, although there's no denying her drive, passion, and musical vision. That said, Gravel & Wine, which was originally released in New Zealand in 2011, is a huge-sounding dance-pop album full of songs geared for both the dancefloor and the radio stations that drive people to go there, all big, stomping drums and kinetic high vocals about men who don't measure up, jealous girls, and the trashy, dangerous side of love and other hazards. Among the highlights are "Man Like That," which was prominently featured in the James Bond film Skyfall, the feisty, spunky, and defiant "Devil in Me," and the cautionary tale "Happy Ever After," which pretty much attacks the concept of its title. The dance throttle is to the floor through almost all of this set, but sooner or later, one has to decide about that voice. ~ Steve Leggett