Mama Kaz is from Belfast but has taken the mainstream rock approach with her EP “Lipstick & Cocaine”. Nothing wrong with that, of course, especially when you can back up those heart ripped asunder lyrics with a voice big enough to fill a stadium.
She walks the jagged edge of broken and dysfunctional relationships with people and substances through her words and makes it all real with the kind of confident and worldly vocals that are decorated with nothing more than sheer authenticity. The title track, “Lipstick & Cocaine”, sounds like it should have been a song for Grace Slick back in the days when musicians regarded it as their duty to inhale their royalties. “Surviving”, likewise, speaks of internal pain but not in a testifying Gloria Gaynor kind of way. This song is instead twelve bar blues taken out of the bar and sent home unceremoniously in a taxi.
In these artificial times, there is something positively refreshing about Mama Kaz’s down to earth approach.