Nora Keyes - Songs To Cry By For The Golden Age Of Nothing (dualpLOVER, 2004)

Norah Keyes is blessed with a fingers down the chalkboard wail, a fragile cackling cry that brings up connections with witches, and the dark arts, as in full flight she sounds suspiciously like a wizened old hag who possibly communicates with evil spirits. Her songs are sparse and morose, primarily accompanied only by organ, they are flat, spooky haunted house folk songs with an edge. It all sounds like it was recorded one hundred years ago, possibly in a tomb. Her cover of Jimmy Rogers Old Pal, with its ghostly cries and Ms Keyes off kilter yodeling is particularly off putting, whilst her incessant cackling and theatrical delivery on Small Apart are enough to produce a form of nervous hysteria in the listener. A true eccentric Norah Keyes debut album, Songs To Cry For The Golden Age of Nothing is very very strange, even by Dual Plover's standards.

Bob Baker Fish

01 Tomb Song
02 Small Apart
03 Look At You, You'Re Ugly
04 Cauliflower
05 My Child
06 Old Pal
07 Excreted From Our Mother's Womb
08 Old Folks
09 The Show Is Over

PBD-703
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dualpLOVER