Joanne Robertson - Painting stupid girls (2020)

Crucial, lilting folk-pop magic from quietly admired cult figure Joanne Robertson; collaborator with Dean Blunt, David Cunningham (Flying Lizards) and Paddy Shine now going solo for first time in four years.

'Painting Stupid Girls’ is the follow-up to Joanne’s ‘Walhalla’ album with Dean Blunt in 2017 (and her input on Blunt's ‘Free Jazz’, 2020), and finds her singing solo accompanied by nowt but acoustic guitar and natural-sounding reverbs. To be frank it’s fuucking gorgeous: she’s got a real way with plaintive delivery and intricately absorbing musical storytelling, spooling quiet yarns that perhaps detectably weave in her other hustle as a fine artist painter in its tingling strokes of melody that keeps her music timeless in a way that naturally loops from glowing folk soul thru the Blues, to Arthur Russell and ’90s dreampop with a hauntingly effective simplicity.

Autumn could hardly be a better season (in the northern hemisphere at least) to receive the slow wilt and cadence of Joanne’s voice and exquisite light touch, which to these city-weary ears sound resigned to a melancholy life indoors, perhaps best summed up in the Glasgow-meets-Seattle styles of ‘Peacecraft’, while the likes of ‘Hit’ and her opening query/statement ‘am I grief’ just deck us with their humbly unadorned folk-pop perfection.

If yr a Dean Blunt devotee or into AR Kane, Lolina, Hype Williams, Laura Cannell or Richard Youngs, you need to make some time for this wee beaut.