Honesty is a rare quality in a singer though it is said that it is the quality of the best of them. If that is indeed the case then Yorkshire singer songwriter Fran Smith is heading for the top judging from the evidence contained in her self titled EP.
Throughout her EP you feel that she has a sense of purpose with the naked emotions projected by her lyrics and her endearingly naturalistic vocals driving her onwards to some sort of catharsis and, despite the unsympathetic production, she always stands tall and proud. “Ghost of a Chance”, for example, eschews sugar coated emotions for a more realistic, and intelligently expressed, approach to matters of the heart. As a song, it is like a power ballad but fuelled by a downtrodden but never beaten spirit. A similar theme preoccupies Ms Smith in “All Wild and Wicked Things” with the result being the distillation of a thousand Gloria Gaynor fuelled girl’s nights out.
The gem of these four songs, however, is “Take These Bones” as, all heart on her sleeve, Fran Smith points her lyrical gun at the comfort of a collapsing relationship that will never end in much the way that Kirsty MacColl would. Only Fran Smith is definitely her own woman and as she sings “…I don’t have too much love left inside of me / Remember you’re taxing the poor”), you just know that she will be laughing all the way to her emotional doom.
Songs like this give me hope that the glee filled mediocrity of Saturday night television is not the be all and end all of music.