Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The confessional is not the preserve of the church, but rather the spirit to which we release our deepest feelings, agendas, insecurities, and motivations, and should we reveal these confessions in art, if we take the dance of acknowledgement of our beliefs enough to state them, to avowal them in a type of waking dreams as well as the idling slumber of ethereal driven life.
In her debut album, Dreaming In Slow Motion, Danielle Lewis captures the essence of the lyrical language of a poetic mother tongue wrapped in sentiment, creative beauty and tantalising expression, as Dylan Thomas perhaps showed in Under Milk Wood, “still lost in the clangour and music of Welsh-spoken dreams” but forceful enough to drive her own dreams, the point of expression forging the conflict within, home.
Across tracks such as A Woman Like You, My Youth, Slow Sad and Real, Life of Worth, Let Me Imagine, and the album title track, Dreaming In Slow Motion, Danielle Lewis takes the praise heaped upon her as one of the leading lights in the Welsh alternative folk scene, and with the touch of an eagle’s feather caught in the updraft of aspiration and belief, brings a balance to the music she has created and the counter argument of certain faith in the oppression of conflicting emotional states of mind.
It is in the dream that we afforded a glimpse of what might be, that vision beyond the gossamer fringe, and with class, with sensuality and a full embrace of the narrative, Danielle Lewis shows that in slow motion what we perceive as a symbol of our existence, the express train hurtling along out of control, is in actual fact a stimulating, animating portrayal of a cruise to which, if we pay attention, can be enlightening…not for the crass and brutish, but for the sensitive, those willing to look to the sides and watch life pass with all its glory, to experience every bump in the water, to highlight all that passes within the dream.
An excellent debut recording; the future is bright for Danielle Lewis.
Danielle Lewis releases Dreaming In Slow Motion on 19th November.
Ian D. Hall