My Brightest Diamond - 'A Thousand Shark's Teeth'
My Brightest Diamond is the vehicle for classically trained singer-songwriter Shara Worden, her latest album 'A Thousand Shark’s Teeth' mixing rock, cabaret and early 20th century ‘classical’ in a sophisticated and compelling blend.
The girl can certainly sing. Possessing an expansive, slightly husky voice, Worden executes velvety glides up the register before falling to rest on a deeply full-throated tremolo with equal ease. While there’s perhaps a touch of Beth Gibbons about her often darkly hued vocals, Worden probably has more in common with St Vincent, both artists utilising sometimes wildly inventive instrumentation and arrangements in support of their gorgeously enunciated singing.
First single ‘Inside A Boy’ sets the mood, an insistent acoustic guitar line supported by anxiously subdued strings being suddenly blown open by menacing electrics. Traces of Bjork inform ‘Ice & the Storm’, richly orchestrated strings mingling with fluttering harp figures that flash in the mix over a beat that washes past with the inevitability of glacier melt.
Some of the material perhaps suffers from the overly esoteric instrumentation, the marimbas interspersed through the ‘playful’ (read: bizarre) murmur of ‘Apples’ for instance, or the irregular grabs of violin and woodblock on ‘Like A Sieve’. However, the majority of songs benefit from Worden’s urbane orchestration. The stylishly ominous ‘Black & Costaud’ for example, which sounds as though it were written to accompany a murder scene in a film from the 1930s. Or the dark, even surreal upsurging of strings that unfurl like some otherworldly metamorphosis on ‘Goodbye Forever’. Not everything is doom and gloom though, the mild pall that lingers over the album’s second half lifting for the disarming joy that swells at the climax of closer ‘My Diamond’, a sunbeam piercing through a thunderhead.
'A Thousand Shark’s Teeth' isn’t a completely unalloyed success, too many songs becoming bogged down by the obscurity of their arrangement. When it works however, Worden’s music possesses a refined and persuasive quality in which it is very easy to be swept away. Well worth checking out.