Review Summary: "What is this, happy? I think I'll go on..."
I first saw Grace Cummings in the Melbourne winter of 2022, supporting her new album
Storm Queen at the Night Cat in Fitzroy. About ten minutes before my friend and I arrived, I was hit by waves of nausea from a dodgy servo sausage roll; by the time we were in the doors, I was so overwhelmed that my mate leaned me against the wall at the back like a broom and I just… stayed there… trapped in my non-functioning body… for the entire set.
It's easy to convince myself of a personal folklore – that my being rooted to the spot was an anticipation of the transfixing experience of seeing Grace Cummings perform. On an emotional level, you could feel her gaze as she looked around the audience. On a
physical level, you could feel her voice. In the same way that the vibrations of the drums and the guitar buzzed against my spot on the wall, I could feel the rise and fall of the battle cry that was Grace Cummings’ resonant baritone. It was like a volcano erupting in super slow motion. It was the sound of an unblinking stare. It was like hearing Boadicea, a keening banshee, Janis Joplin… I’m getting carried away here. Forgive me, I will try to keep sensible from now.
At the end of the set, a chap in front of me chuckled, “I think this will be the last time we see her in a place this small.”
And so, Grace Cummings set off on a tour for North America and found its mythical landscapes working their way into the lyrics of her third album
Ramona. Hollywood, canyons, cowboys and eagles all return as imagery of her east coast travels and the Great American Songbook opens itself to her too: ‘Something Going Round’ has a chord progression similar to Simon and Garfunkel’s immortal ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and name drops the legend of John Henry. The Motown air raid ‘Everybody’s Somebody’ sings straight out of the book from which Carole King penned so many classics. Cummings becomes another young songwriter supplicated to Bob Dylan: the album’s title is cribbed from his song ‘To Ramona’ and the title track’s lyric “You play, just like Ramona/And you kiss just like Ramona/You weep, just like Ramona/It’s so hard, just like Ramona” dances cheek-to-cheek with the master’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.
The sound of
Storm Queen was ye olde English folk troubadour, raw outside of the natural polish of Cummings’ timbre. With American producer Jonathan Wilson at her side, it is unsurprising that
Ramona is a budget upgrade with its singer now in ensembles of strings and brass (a full-scale R&B or even a jazz album should be expected down the road from Cummings). Wilson clearly is a shrewd assessor of his talent: the theatrical grandeur of his arrangements and chamber spaciousness suits the performances with deserved drama.
The album’s themes are definitely troubling and do not suggest an artist who has arrived at a promised land within herself. The characters of
Ramona are often desensitised to the world around them and stuck in ruts from which they are ready to move on – on the truly spectacular ‘A Precious Thing’, Cummings howls, “Love is just a thing/That I’m trying to live without/And oh, what a precious thing/But it’s nothing I care about.” The title track’s protagonist is a woman who has come to accept that her partner loves another while ‘Common Man’ is a song of “complete freedom and detachment from this mundane world” written in response to a friend of Cummings’ who told her he wished he could live the daily grind of the 9-5.
Should Cummings draw enough ears in the land of the free, the romanticisation of California and dark, glowing, pastoral treble of her voice will doubtless draw parallels to Lana Del Rey, Lucinda Williams and Joni Mitchell. The power emanating from her diaphragm helps her hold notes of any volume or pitch without rasp or strain. In the performances on
Ramona, she never seems like she has hit her ceiling.
In an interview with WXPN’s Emma Polyak, Cummings revealed her artistic motive to “offer the world something that it doesn’t already have”. As classical as Cummings’ stylings may be and as clear as her inspirations may ring,
Ramona is nonetheless another instantly striking and powerful album in the body of work of the sort of artist that the world very much needs at any time in its history.
