Shining Brother, Shining Sister. . - Mixed Media - sound recording review

New Internationalist, May, 2003

by Jackie Leven

REVIEWERS

(Cooking Vinyl COOKCD25O CD)

Peter Whittaker * Louise Gray * Malcolm Lewis * George Fisher

It's difficult to place Jackie Leven. The Scot is one of those singer-songwriters whose complex talents have never been properly served by the often simpler demands of music industry and audience alike.

Leven wrote songs that wanted to be poems and poems that wanted to be songs and, if he never quite managed this crossover in the past, then Shining Brother, Shining Sister is the bravest stab that he's made to date.

Taking its title from a Pablo Neruda poem, the album's relationship to poetry is inextricable. Twelve poets (Mandelstam, Yeats, Rilke and Sitwell among them), twelve songs. Mostly the poems are tacked on to Leven's own big, airy numbers, as codas read by invited guests who include Robert Bly, Ron Sexsmith and Eddi Reader. The effect can often be sprawling -- it's difficult to know who's doing what -- but it is always interesting.

Although the album's production is sometimes let down by predictability (wailing train noises to accompany a railroad lyric, hammers for an industrial motif) and some excruciating lyrics (an addict's 'life lived in vein'), that doesn't detract from the reach of Leven's songs themselves. Shining Brother, Shining Sister bubbles with a similar kind of passion to that of Bruce Springsteen, his songs observing the minute and finite detail of life.

Rating ***

STAR RATING

www.jockieleven.com

EXCELLENT * * * * *

VERY GOOD * * * *

GOOD * * *

FAIR * *

POOR *