Thea Gilmore - Strange Communion 2009

With each coming Christmas season I become more and more troubled by what the music scene is going to thrust upon us. This year has been filled with surprises more than disappointments and for that I am eternally grateful. From Halford to Dylan to Weezer I have been pleasantly gifted by each new release so far, but this one I say takes the cake so far. Britain's Thea Gilmore , folk singer and lyricist extraordianaire, has released her own contemplative if not cynical Christmas themed "Strange Communion".

With the exception of a few tracks, Strange Communion doesn’t seem particularly Christmassy, or even wintry, but it feels as comfy as a pair of slippers. Of the ten tracks, eight were penned by Thea and/or her husband and long-time producer Nigel Stonier, and the remaining two are covers of lesser known recordings by Yoko Ono (‘Listen, The Snow Is Falling’) and Elvis Costello (‘The St Stephens Day Murders’). Consequently, what we get is a very personal reflection on the festive season, exemplified best on the tellingly titled ‘Thea Gilmore’s Midwinter Toast’. Starting out plaintive and honest, Semay Wu’s cello accenting the melancholic twinge in Gilmore’s vocal and acting contrapuntally to the faint, synthesized choral backing that emerges later, it’s part love letter to her fans, part affirmation of her faith in the power of song.

Having given us a whopping nine studio albums in 11 years, it’s forgivable that Gilmore hasn’t shown the same amount of artistic progression between releases as some of her peers, but Strange Communion shows this fact up more than any other. So while ‘Cold Coming’ sounds uncannily like a leftover from Harpo’s Ghost given extra bells (no whistles), both ‘Drunken Angel’ and ‘Old December’ echo the weary ruminations of last year’s Liejacker. That’s not to say that Gilmore doesn’t stretch herself at all here; she does, in good and bad ways. By recruiting BBC Radio 2 DJ Mark Radcliffe to be her male vocal foil on ‘The St Stephens Day Murders’, Gilmore turns a very silly song even sillier. Even looking favourably on Radcliffe’s dominating gusto, the delivery so acutely recalls the infallible Pogues and Kirsty MacColl duet, ‘Fairytale Of New York’, that its ramshackle nature feels a little forced.

Ever the outsider, you get the sense that Gilmore has an indefinite struggle with the idea of Christmas. On album opener ‘Sol Invictus’ (Latin: ‘the unconquered Sun’), beautifully recorded with a cappella choir Sense Of Sound, she sounds much more at home with the straightforward Pagan sentiments of the lyric than when rolling her words around to avoid overt Christian terminology. Likewise, the spoken-word ‘Book Of Christmas’ sounds awkward on paper, but the heavily politicised lyric, courtesy of Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, is so very Thea that she pulls it off. It helps that Nigel Stonier’s electric piano and harmonium backdrop on this song is probably Strange Communion at its most musically interesting, with all its shades of Moon Palace-era Lisa Germano. For pure evocative songwriting, though, a timely re-recording of ‘December In New York’ from the long out of print As If EP is the album’s main draw, achieving a difficult balance between stark and poetic over a simple circular melody.

Of course, what the vast majority of people seem to want at Christmas is a feelgood pop singalong, and Gilmore bravely steps up to the plate with ‘That’ll Be Christmas’, Strange Communion’s only real attempt at the money shot. Drawing on various Christmas staples – mulled wine, ‘The Sound Of Music’, Jona Lewie, mistletoe – Gilmore cleverly crafts her words to take a sideways swipe at Christmas while simultaneously celebrating it, a two-handed approach that probably captures how a lot of us feel about the whole ordeal. In fact, it’s this attitude that really serves to sum up Strange Communion as an entity, a Christmas album for people who don’t really like Christmas, or at least who view it with a healthy dose of cynicism. Even pseudo-Scrooges need music, and this modestly ambitious and solid collection caters to them perfectly.


here is a clip of Mrs. Gilmore for those that heven't the pleasure to have heard her as of yet.

Artist: Thea Gilmore
Album: Strange Communion
Genre: Folk,Indie, Acoustic
Country: UK
Download: Here