The Dear Janes Skirt Sore Thumb Records
Dark work delivered with a deceptively light musical touch this, the Dear Janes' third album in their decade together is highly wrought on a number of levels. There's a perfect harmony between the respectively sweet'n'young and deeper'n'darker voices of the two Jane ladies (why can no one in a Christian-named band match their professional title with personal birth certificates?) who share each song impressively equally. There's a lovingly loaded musical backdrop to each tune too. Songs like 'She Was The Dynamite' and the Billy Bragg and BJ Cole-boasting 'Ship' are seemingly soft and pretty songs which slowly grow huge upon the listener, expanding in the eardrum in their own sweet time. This is truly involving entertainment, with enthusiastically depressive lonely- poetry lyrics counter-pointing the pretty melodies and near-Heavenly vocal choralling. However, even more exciting than all of this simpler pleasure is 'Skirt's' penultimate song 'Skimming', in which some insistent electronica and edgy guitar finally match the bleak power of the intense, impassioned vocal. As the Dear Janes grow darker, it seems they grow more brilliant too. ES