Every now and then a debut album comes along that feels almost immaculately formed; the product of intense craftsmanship and a keen eye for nuance, balance and mood. Love Your Dum and Mad, the first full-length from Geordie – via Norway and Pakistan – songwriter Nadine Shah is the perfect example of this. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, however: its 11 tracks have been around in one form or another since Shah released her first EP, Aching Bones, in late 2012. Given the proper time and space to develop though, her outward-glancing musings over the human condition have taken on a life of their own, rich in character and colour.
These qualities find themselves so fleshed out on Love Your Dum and Mad, in fact, that each song feels akin to a vividly realised vignette of its respective protagonist and setting. You can almost smell the stale beer and smoke-stained pub curtains brought to life by the album’s lurching lead single ‘To Be a Young Man’; while ‘Filthy Game’, with its rustling, post-industrial clatter clinging to the edge of audibility, wonderfully encapsulates the fractured beauty of factories and mills now standing dishearteningly vacant.
It’s a telling sign of the sense of timelessness carefully cultivated on Love Your Dum and Mad; a quality facilitated by a number of factors. The first being the way in which it was recorded: particularly its latter half. Setting up shop in a disused Northern warehouse, Shah and producer Ben Hillier went about laying down ambient takes of the album’s closing side in its booming expanses, allowing dashes of nocturnal piano to bound around the room, rattling chains and dishevelling long-settled dust. In doing so, they’re pristinely captured the melancholy of a lost time kept dimly alive in the minds of a select few: whether that be the lovers longing for escape from the grey milieu of over-trodden streets on ‘Dreary Town’ or the re-treading of these steps on the aptly titled ‘Remember’.
It would all come to nothing, though, were it not for Shah’s natural cunning as a lyricist: a trait most succinctly seen on album highlight ‘Runaway’. Here, Shah takes on the role of a usurped spouse, spouting out barbs with a precise balance of resentment and defiance. As steady drums rise up and guitars chug ceaselessly, she reprieves her no longer faithful beau with a simple cry of, “Run away to your whore, runaway.” It’s without doubt one of the most potent exorcisms of self on Love Your Dum and Mad: but it’s far from the only one. No, Lover Your Dum and Mad is an album marked by characters discovering themselves through song, lushly brought to life by Shah’s rich vocals: a stirring concoction of PJ Harvey-esque catharsis and the deep dulcetness of Torres’ Mackenzie Scott.
As proceedings draw to a close on the twinkling arpeggios of album finale ‘Winter Reigns’, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve experienced a small part of what Shah’s deftly depicted musical case studies have. As she beckons you to, “walk with me down this busy street/onto my favourite port”, there’s not a second thought in your mind. Shah, the great storyteller, has led you along bitingly cold, cobbled paths to the warmth of a fiery hearth wherein she’s regaled you with countless tales of damaged souls and plans gone awry, gripping you every step of the way. If that’s not the mark of a great bard, I don’t know what is.
- Alex Cull
Love Your Dum and Mad is out now on Apollo. You can order it here.
