Come Home to Mama
Martha Wainwright has no time for the timid. Her son was born, her mother died and her marriage is a balancing act. Wainwright\'s mom, singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, wrote one final song, \"Proserpina,\" inspired by Roman myth, the story of spring, that Martha sings in her mother\'s voice as a tribute and to be closer to her spirit. The entire album is as naked as Martha on the album cover. She sings to her newborn, on \"Everything Wrong,\" about the ups and downs of her own marriage. \"Can You Believe It?\" tells us make-up sex is all she gets. From the beginning strains of \"I Am Sorry\" to the elegiac live performance of \"I Am A Diamond,\" Wainwright imbues every note with 100% commitment. Her theatrical vocals, channelling Yoko Ono and Tori Amos, breathe unstoppable life into the club-thumping \"I Wanna Make An Arrest\" and the scale-climbing \"Radio Star.\" This is epic.
Martha Wainwright's third studio album was produced by Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda. Featuring guest spots from Sean Lennon, Wilco's Nels Cline, and Dirty Three's Jim White, it gets its title from the collection's centerpiece, the last song Wainwright's mother Kate McGarrigle wrote before dying of cancer.
It may not be cohesive or instant but Martha Wainwright's Come Home to Mama nevertheless confirms her as an important singer-songwriter of our time.
Canadian-American singer-songwriter and all-around hyphenated artist Martha Wainwright's third studio album, Come Home To…
The greater resonance of the affecting lyrics is coupled with deftly understated and graceful arrangements.
With her third full studio album Come Home to Mama, the younger of music's most beige siblings since Oasis continues to settle nicely into Canada's throne of easy-listening bland-pop vacated all those years ago now by Shania Twain.
<p>Martha Wainwright contemplates motherhood on her third album but fails to match the power of her older songs, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong></p>
Some of Martha Wainwright's new set are heartbreakingly acute, and others downright cheeky, writes <strong>Maddy Costa</strong>
Rufus's sister almost delivers the album we've been waiting for. CD review by Russ Coffey