Martha Wainwright - Love Will Be Reborn
Martha Wainwright's first recorded album in five years documents the rebuilding of her life and the finding of new love following a painful divorce from a ten-year marriage. While hopefulness is tempered by experience, these 11 songs are uniformly powerful and Wainwright’s voice – always a thing of beauty – is on terrific, soulful form.
Down the years, Wainwright (a scion of the McGarrigle / Wainwright folk dynasty) has added torch song, jazz and chamber pop to a base of confessional folk. Here, she has settled on a mix of alt-country and artful adult pop that brings to mind both Lucinda Williams’ tough tenderness and the dazed richness of Kate Bush, whose voice her own often recalls.
As always, Wainwright is generous with her emotions, which makes the songs sound limitless and free even as they touch on pain and uncertainty - as in the knockout 'Getting Older', where her voice seems to scrape the sky, and the sly, wounded 'Report Card'. She sounds ready to burn it all down on 'Rainbow', while the cantering and gloriously redemptive title track evokes kd lang's gilded pop splendour. "From the ruins there will come a new moon, a new born son / We’ll drink the dew from the flower’s hands and ride on winged back to the new land," declares Wainwright, ever fearless.
Released August 20. Label: Pheromone / Cooking Vinyl