It seems somehow cruel to criticise A Taste of Truth, the latest EP by English folk singer-songwriter Brooke Sharkey. She can clearly play guitar well, has a good finger picking style and an interesting, albeit indistinct folk singer’s voice.
Nevertheless it is impossible to review her EP properly without highlighting its faults and since her PR people have taken the time to send us her EP it is only fair that we take the time to review it properly.
Let’s start with one of the gravest problems – her strange slipping between French and English vocals. While a potential unique selling point to set her apart from those like Laura Marling, on tracks such as ‘If We Were Water’ this constant bilingual switching sounds muddled. The lyrics don’t quite sound right in French at times, too forced and translated. This is a particular shame as this is actually the best song on the EP
Production wise across all five tracks there are all sorts of problems. Listening to the likes of Laura Marling or other far better contemporary folk artists like Broadcast 2000 and the Wilkommen bands such as Miserable Rich there is a real depth to the music from top to bottom. Sharkey should listen to them and learn.
Take the top end of the music on the rest of the tracks such as ‘Home’ and ‘Our Ways’ for example. The emphasis on guitar and instruments like cello are too bottom end, it leaves a gap at the top that those like Marling and Broadcast 2000 fill with a twinkly glockenspiel or treble heavy snare. Sharkey’s often high voice can’t fill this on its own.
Also her voice while strong and competent too often slips into a little whisper at the end of songs. It’s chummy, like she’s playing at a party, but on CD it comes across as a bit silly.
She is clearly well loved by the 600 of so fans on Facebook, but she will need to up the ante on her next CD if she genuinely wants to reach a bigger audience. I’m assuming she does want this. She has a PR firm promoting her for a start. Not many new indie folk artists can afford or have access to that.
But such promotion needs to be backed with genuine pop or musical sensibility, which at this stage in her career she lacks. Image wise she needs an overhaul as well. The little girl lost images on the CD cover, featuring her cross-legged on stage or standing by a fence with guitar on back makes this 22 year old look childish rather than a serious artist. It doesn’t help that on the back cover she also appears to be wheeling some kind of granny shopping trolley. It looks like she got lost on the way back to her student house from Asda rather than heading to some great musical adventure or busking gig.
Why be so cruel? I hope this review isn’t taken in that way. Our aim is to be constructive, Sharkey can be so much better and we want her to be as successful as she wants to be. It just appears on this evidence that she is surrounded by too many people willing to let her faults pass without comment.
4/10
by Joe Lepper, Aug 2010
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