Thea Gilmore
Album: Regardless
Label: Full Fill
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.theagilmore.net

Thea Gilmore is one of the UK's most critically acclaimed songwriters as well as being one of the most prolific, "Regardless" is album fourteen in as many years, years that have also been spent with a hard gigging ethic, it's a schedule that Gilmore acknowledges can create a danger of hollowing a rut, unless you can find something different to challenge you. Well part of those challenges included working on unfinished Sandy Denny songs, "Don't Stop Singing" and having a second child.

You'll be pleased to know that the second one of those two experiences haven't lead to a concept album around the pros and cons of the birth experience rather it's given her a space to step back, relax a little and take a helicopter view of what is going on outside of the world of music. Now that combined with a perspective of working with the likes of Sandy Denny, albeit after her death, seems to have given her own work a new vitality.

"Spit And Shine" is a song that asks questions about life directions, what now constitutes the journey and rites of passage. The thing I like about it is that older perspective, heading off to find yourself not being just that gap year thing, more and more people are thinking about and often jacking it in later in life and heading off to explore the world and themselves.

I think one of the other Denny legacies that can be felt in "Regardless" is the size of the album, it feels bigger, more use of strings, soundwise it's got more of a spangly feel than previous cuts, but, and this is key, that really does allow Gilmore's smoky vocal to stand apart, that dark humour to cut through and stand proud.

If Gilmore had been worried about stagnating, "Regardless" is the album that will certainly shoot down that thought. "London" one of the collaborative Sandy Denny track raised Thea's profile during the Olympics, "Love Came Looking For Me", the first single from "Regardless" will, hopefully, be the next stage in the process that raises her from being critically acclaimed to publically acknowledged and ultimately into "Regardless" and the back catalogue.

Neil King