Mary Lorson & the Soubrettes - BurnBabyBurn (2011)

Mary Lorson is one of those songwriters you can put your faith in. You can rely on this one. No hype, nothing fancy, no gimmicks. She is steady, she is solid, she is, at her best, utterly sublime. It was a worry that she may never better the 2002 album she recorded with Saint Low, Tricks For Dawn, which swiftly entered the canon of albums you can always turn to, when fads fade and whims fail you. How can you better that?

Well, you can’t. But you can equal it. And on BurnBabyBurn she does just that. Here’s she’s riffing on the same musical themes that we’ve heard from her before. As the song cycles softly behind her, Mary Lorson coos and hums gently, making the world feel like a safer place than it ever really will be. Like her sometime play-partner, Tanya Donelly, her voice is a saccharine anaesthesia, looking down on the world and serving up a gentle analysis. ‘Only One Number Two’ is the gentlest of these, a cosy, piano-led number that opens with the lines “you walk the roof / whenever you want / bare feet on tar / the street below… it doesn’t matter / but, yes it does.” A heart in turmoil, emotions battling for supremacy and few singers do heartbreak with as much finesse as Mary Lorson.