Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
So Deadly Is The Woman that they can break your heart, can teach you how to fly, and have you searching your soul and question your mind. So deadly is the woman that anyone can lose their heart to them, and the spells cast, innocent, provocative, sensual, demanding, fearsome, calm and collected passions and mournful cries of nostalgia, all combine to leave their mark underneath the skin; like a tattoo that is visible on the surface but has been inflicted beneath the hide, you are branded for life, for good or for ill, you are hers.
It is a game, a release, the embrace in which the first seeds of love are carefully sewn into the ground, in which the first scratch is made with the tattoo gun, and Megan Black in her debut album, Deadly Is The Woman, makes no fuss about stating a truth to her which is infallible, and to which the rest of humanity knows only to well to be an exotic and tuneful aura which with sentiment and hard fact can only be a reality in which we do our darndest to occupy and be enveloped by.
Not so much songs but sweet promises from a manifesto delivered with pride, love and a small sign which states abandon hope all who dare try and knock me down, Megan Black delivers the opener Sweet Bisexual, Freedom Belongs To Him, Does That Make Me Eve?, What Else Am I Good For, and The Subtleties Of Sadness with an air, an atmosphere of intoxication and melody, the album is steeped in the infectious rise of asserted sexual identity and liberation, the emancipation of repressive attitudes and the authorisation of one’s own story.
An album of true grit, determination, of sexual certainty and the whisper of magic that is weaved to create a new dimension, Megan Black inhabits the deadly and leaves the listener as putty in her hands.
So Deadly Is The Woman, so dangerously cool is the action and response.
Megan Black’s Deadly Is The Woman is released on April 1st.
Ian D. Hall