D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

Not long ago, I praised T Bone Burnett’s latest offering for its challenging insistence to forgo conventional melodies, so it’d seem strange to criticise Martha Wainwright’s new album for doing much the same thing.

However, where Burnett maintains the listener’s interest through stunning musicianship, vivid lyricism, and a keen grasp of tone and atmosphere, Martha’s effort embodies none of these things, at least to these ears.

Martha offers one big surprise though: little of the album concerns itself with the apparently questionable parenting skills of her father, Loudon Wainwright III, the titular Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole of her breakthrough EP. He makes a brief appearance on Jimi – “sometimes I feel like my dad, for leaving her sad and alone in this big house” – and is perhaps obliquely referenced on In The Middle Of The Night, but otherwise he’s conspicuous by his absence. I’m not even sure why this matters – it doesn’t, really – but it at least makes a bit of a change.

Maybe a lack of familiarity on my part is to blame, but Wainwright seems to lack much of a personality of her own, certainly compared with her rather more flamboyant sibling, Rufus. It sometimes appears that she wishes to personify herself solely through the acrobatics of her voice. Get beyond that and there isn’t a lot else of interest, particularly when her voice is forcefully high in the mix (more so when she’s harmonising with herself).

Of course, the themes of loss, rejection and betrayal are well trodden ground, but this doesn’t matter when you connect with the voice as much as, if not more than, the lyrics themselves. The voice is the first way in which we relate to the personality: in order to listen, we first have to hear. (After all, detractors of Bob Dylan tend to focus on the voice even when admiring his words in isolation.)

Here, melodies lurch off course, as Wainwright tends to forget about delivering a line in favour of toying with each word’s individual cadence.