Jessica Rydén
Album: My Little Heart
Label: Flare
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.jessicaryden.se

Jessica's a singer-songwriter from Sweden, who combines her love of pop-styled melodies with what she terms "the honesty of the singer-songwriter tradition". My Little Heart is the product - nay, culmination - of the past six years of songwriting, where Jessica has evidently experienced a cathartic honesty of expression that she feels able to share intimately and disarmingly with her listeners.

Familiar themes like longing and the celebration of life are explored to gentle keyboard (mainly piano) backdrops, with effective embellishment from other instrumental colours (guitar, bass, cello). The best of Jessica's songs, like Chosen By Love, have a compelling, yearningly aromatic quality that harks back to some of the classic late-60s/early-70s singer-songwriters - indeed, Jessica references Joni Mitchell with a song of her own entitled The Last Time I Saw Richard, which employs an intriguing dramatic structure. The closing track Time, too, is another haunting instance of how the songwriting tradition has been a beneficial influence on Jessica. However, sometimes (as on Billie Sings The Blues) the lyrics themselves (with the best will in the world!) do appear a touch obvious, even simplistic. And some other songs seem over-dramatised, with an unsureness of expression that seems striving for effect within a milieu that inspires but doesn't quite inform the communication of the lyrics, not helped also by a mannered kind of received-vocalisation that can on occasion mildly irritate.

The torchy I Got Life is an example of this tendency, while the deliberate discords and effects of South Africa appear distinctly manufactured and fail to convince, however successfully disturbing and involving Jessica's lyrics may appear on paper. As a result, the impression given by My Little Heart as a whole is rather mixed, with the more promising elements in Jessica's writing a touch compromised by the somewhat all-purpose (and consequently unfocused), on occasion even slightly twee, nature of the pop-mode musical settings she's chosen to adopt on songs like Today. And that in the end is a shame when I can, and will, happily play the best tracks over and again.

David Kidman