It’s an odd effect, but Scottish songstress Iona Bain always sounds as if she’s about to burst out laughing. There are a couple of artists out there who had this quality but they’ve been off the stage for rather a while-Theresa Brewer and Doris Day come to mind. Although Iona’s style is old-fashioned, her music doesn’t quite hark back to those antediluvian acts (still being played on rockin’ Radio 2 of of course). Instead, her jaunty, sophisticated pop songs are often adorned with eighties-era synthesizers and drum beats that sound like they have been appropriated from ‘Thriller’-era Michael Jackson. Not promising then, you might think, but Bain has a real gift for melody, is an excellent pianist and her optimistic, gentle singing is uncomplicatedly loveable.
After all that praise then, probably her weakest tune on this collection is the first, the would-be funky ‘Emma’, awash with synthesizer sounds that should never have seen out the decade to blame for creating them. More important, why should a song about Jane Austen be funky at all? Shouldn’t it be all string orchestras and harpsichords? Be that as it may, we lose about two thirds of Iona’s words, due to the intrusiveness of the backing track.
Balance is restored in the plangent ballad, ‘Yet’, with Iona’s jaunty vocal backed only by a jazzy solo piano, the big opening riff having affinity with the one that begins Mark Cohn’s ‘Walking in Memphis’. Quality is maintained in the ridiculously catchy, ‘Romeo’, which adds both Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson to the literary canon namechecked on the record (could Iona be an English major, I wonder?). The production is still a little synthetic, but less heavy-handed than on ‘Emma’ and is all the better for it. The piano is compressed so that it sounds more like a clavinette, whose comedic style adds to the predominant mood of romantic semi-seriousness. I think this tune captures the essentials of Iona’s unusual charm: at their best, Bain’s songs momentarily restore our childish faith in love as being primarily about enraptured students having picnics on the Cherwell and reading Shelley to each other. Beats entire CDs about meeting chavs while collecting your giro any day.