Little Black Numbers - Kathryn Williams

...for her. Her second album, Little Black Numbers, was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize. At the awards dinner, she says, “I felt like I should have had an apron on, serving food.”

The 12 tracks which impressed the Mercury judges at first confirm that shrinking violet image. Kathryn Williams’s voice is a fragile thing. The instrumentation is almost totally acoustic: cello, double bass and classical guitar and the occasional line of ...
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The songs on Little Black Numbers are personal; addressed to departed friends and uncommitted lovers. ‘Soul to Feet’ tackles a partner directly, arguing for thoughtful silence over empty talk. Often critical, usually affectionate, Williams delivers emotional truths via miniatures of everyday life. On ‘Stood’ she tells of unrequited devotion: “I used to follow you round in a casual way / Miss good shows on the radio / Just to see your face”.
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Much of today’s production-line pop delivers clichés with a disturbingly passionate intensity. So it’s refreshing to discover heartfelt feeling conveyed with understated modesty.

Which is why twenty-nine year old Liverpudlian Kathryn Williams is such a find. She is very good at modesty: she got her first gigs only when her friends, exasperated at her inaction, booked them for her. Her second album, Little Black Numbers, was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize. At the awards dinner, she says, “I felt like I should have had an apron on, serving food.”

The 12 tracks which impressed the Mercury judges at first confirm that shrinking violet image. Kathryn Williams’s voice is a fragile thing. The instrumentation is almost totally acoustic: cello, double bass and classical guitar and the occasional line of saxophone. She describes it as less a wall of sound, more of a trellis.

She said in an interview that this is "a soporific album. It's heartfelt and honest and in my eyes it's unique but that's about it really. I don't know, people say they like it." But however much she talks down her achievement, these subtle songs deliver a powerful punch.

For it’s not only the music that’s deceptively robust. Her light, breathy vocals deliver feisty lines such as “I’m nobody’s fool”, “I’m more now I’m not with you” and “I just want... one more argument”. Kathryn Williams, you soon realise, is tougher than her unassuming style suggests.

The songs on Little Black Numbers are personal; addressed to departed friends and uncommitted lovers. ‘Soul to Feet’ tackles a partner directly, arguing for thoughtful silence over empty talk. Often critical, usually affectionate, Williams delivers emotional truths via miniatures of everyday life. On ‘Stood’ she tells of unrequited devotion: “I used to follow you round in a casual way / Miss good shows on the radio / Just to see your face”.

While songs like that show she’s strong enough to show her vulnerable side, there’s a steely resolve to her attack on the self-absorbed subject of ‘Tell The Truth As If It Were Lies': “The beauty you keep is not from within / You’ll be saying bye bye bye bye to it soon.”

Slow in tempo and understated in delivery, the songs can seem deceptively slight. At this point it is traditional to make the obligatory Nick Drake comparison. (Anyone who operates in the folky, acoustic singer-songwriter genre comes up against it eventually).

But Kathryn Williams is a more formidable character than Drake – although she clearly reveres him, having provided one of the highlights to a tribute concert to the man. While she shares Drake’s taste for stripped-back but sturdy arrangements, she doesn’t go in for his instrumental virtuosity. And her brand of vulnerability is shot through with a bracing streak of toughness.

So although ‘We Dug a Hole’ – a celebration of lovers retreating from the world – starts with fragile finger-picked guitar and simple bass, it builds in intensity as drums and cellos work up a hypnotic, organic groove. ‘Jasmine Hoop’ is bolstered by Hammond organ in the choruses to create a heady affirmation of confidence towards a weak-willed lover.

‘Fell Down Fast’ is built around some of the most muscular double bass work in popular music since Danny Thompson’s contributions to John Martyn’s Solid Air. Like that Martyn song (which was about Nick Drake, as it happens), it is a touching lament for a lost friend. Williams has a further link with John Martyn: the grizzled doyen of British folk-rock was one of the first to spot her talent, and asked her to appear on his Glasgow Walker album in 2000.

Just when the atmosphere of Little Black Numbers threatens to become claustrophobic, Williams shows she can shift her focus from the personal to the universal. In the final tracks: ‘Each Star We See’ and ‘We Came Down From The Trees’, she casts a solitary, yearning, even insignificant figure against a backdrop of space and time (“Each star we see in the sky is a sun / like our own beginning to die”, or “Maybe we were happier before / we came down from the trees”).

She reminds me of Suzanne Vega in her phrasing, her persona, and in the way she uses unremarkable objects and incidents to symbolise a more general mood or feeling. Her assured imagery and certainty of attitude dispel any whimsy. And while she doesn’t sound much like Joni Mitchell, she has a similar way with an oblique lyric – and a comparable visual flair: like Mitchell, former art student Williams designs her own record artwork.

Kathryn Williams has since issued a third album (2002’s Old Low Light), and established a growing reputation in the overcrowded field of folky pop. Her self-reliance (she paid for her first two albums out of her own pocket), her solid roots (her father was a sixties folk singer) and distinctive musical settings look likely to stand her in good stead. Modest she might be; magnificent she surely is.

Track listing:

1. We dug a hole
2. Soul to feet
3. Stood
4. Jasmine hoop
5. Fell down fast
6. Flicker
7. Intermission
8. Tell the truth as if it were lies
9. Morning song
10. Toocan
11. Each star we see
12. We came down from the trees

Amazingly, you might be able to pick this up for around £3 in sales or discount outlets (as I did). It regularly crops up on Ebay for about that price too.

 

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