I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too

by

Martha Wainwright

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Martha Wainwright, Loudon III's lass proves herself a serious songwriter and performer and that she really has the range on her lovely second album.

Don't just read trauma into the title - there's breezy wit and raw self-knowledge in there, too.

Not since fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette's album Jagged Little Pill have we been so confronted with a female singer-songwriter with so much to confess.

Granted Martha Wainwright doesn't wail with quite as much angst as Morissette but she has her own distinctly histrionic way of venting her spleen.

The disc's 13 songs exhibit rampant growth in all directions, from the subtlety and originality of the arrangements, to the quality of the words and melodies. She hauls the listener through reflections on departed friends, lost lovers, and her mother's brush with cancer. The jangling chorus in "You Cheated Me" gets a leg up from Pete Townshend's guitar, while the mysterious love song, "Niger River", was inspired by her new husband (and co-producer) Brad Albetta.

Whether trashing her father Loudon Wainwright III and his well-documented parental misgivings or her various former lovers, she evidently doesn't struggle to articulate her feelings in song.

And despite the success of her self-titled 2005 debut album she hasn't run out of disgruntled subject matter to write about. The title alone should give you a pretty good idea of the shape of things to come with this new album.

It opens with the charmingly titled "Bleeding All Over You" and with a jaunty guitar part, as the singer feels her way out of the cave of infatuation.

Then the song intensifies as she recounts meetings with a man whose relationship takes on more weight with each verse. A marriage, a farmhouse, children. But the singer feels her "heart was made for bleeding all over you". She has learned to balance the intensity of her emotion with subtler melodies and gentler arrangements. This is a woman in a coffee shop singing the ache, not a mascara-soaked barfly.

Full of catharsis and dark humour her voice swoops and falls like a husky Kate Bush as she sings, "You've got a girlfriend, and I can only talk about her for so long".

She references "the booze and the smoke and the dope", but intoxication is now recollected in relative tranquillity, allowing the listener to follow her into personal psychological rooms without the awkward feeling that you're taking advantage.

While she continues to analyse and objectify those around her, this time around she also takes a deeper look within side herself. Like her brother Rufus she has a natural aptitude for melodrama and this album facilitates it far more than her debut.

The production has been substantially upsized with the strings and some epic rock dynamics. Poor old Loudon doesn't get away with it entirely here though.

Album highlight "Jimi" finds her earning the words "Sometimes I feel like my dad, for leaving her sad and alone". It is an album full of cathartic exorcism but the lavish production and arrangements set out by her husband Brad Albetta and fellow producers Martin Terefe and Tore Johansson, along with her wonderful wandering voice, do save it from being overly warring or exhausting.

As the daughter of Loudon and his folk-singing wife Kate McGarrigle, and sister of the glittering Rufus, Martha has grown up immersed in her family's psychodramas.

But compare to other members of her family, Martha might well have the broadest commercial appeal.

There are pretty guitar pickings, scrawling rock numbers and a skippy, trippy Sixties sound on her cover of Syd Barrett's "See Emily Play", which is a welcome lighter contrast to the shadier moments.

There's true love to balance the hurt and anger, and lovely, rich, grown-up songs you'll be delighted you invited home.

Be it the pseudo chanteuse of "The Tower Song" or the beautifully constructed and controlled power balladry of "Hearts Club Band", she really does come into her own, clear of the shadow of her brother Rufus and dad.

The quirky voice is now impressive and vibrant, slipping and sliding through "In The Middle Of The Night".

"My" best tracks: : "Bleeding All Over You", "Jimi", "Jesus And Mary" and "In The Middle Of The Night".

Martha Wainwright

and my feelings about this album are not positive. It's a sad day when the best song Martha Wainwright can crank out is a cover, but that's all "I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings, Too" offers. Wainwright's cover of "Love Is A Stranger" is good because it allows her voice to take center stage whereas on the rest of this album things like melody are sacrificed in order to accommodate lyrics that are, at best, mediocre and at worst clunky and cliche. The liner notes list guest spots by her brother Rufus, Donald Fagen and Pete Townshend, but you'd be hard pressed to tease them out of this mess. I own everything Wainwright has released including her early out of print EPs. Oddly it seems like Wainwright is regressing, not progressing musically. I think the best thing she can do is to find herself a good songwriter.