BEAT MAGAZINE - AUSTRALIA
MARISA YEAMAN Pure Motive (Deep Pearl)

Marisa Yeaman has a big advantage over peers who manufacture imagery for urban street cred; the singer soaked up the outback, bush and coast in her childhood when her family hit the road in a caravan. It wasn't exactly rabbit and fox hunting on the Nullabor but it was a world where family love and radio ruled, and TV was an opiate for less fortunate city dwellers. So it's no surprise that on her debut album, after a brace of EPs, she creates organic bliss untainted by fads, fashions and synthetics. Marisa's voice is a vibrant vehicle that steams her speeding train from the evocative entree Watching Fire Burn to her finale, a live cut of Gasoline & Fire.

With sweet serendipity she co-wrote the former with guitarist and co-producer Andrew Pendlebury and cut the latter, replete with her accordion, as a live demo. But rather than spoil the spontaneity, they left it virgo intacta, akin to other live tracks Holy Water and Lonely Puppet. The singer's creative freedom is a rich withdrawal from her paternal memory bank in No Fences; her long deceased sire encouraged creativity, not conformity. Yeaman exploits the flip side of travel in Another Day, with morose melancholia and loneliness, daubed by Pendlebury's Sports sidekick Ed Bates on pedal steel. And she skates on the jagged edge of broken hearts in Vacant Sign and the steel drenched Damned if you love me. But the pervading passion of triumph prevails here. Yeaman doesn't drown in bleak metaphors; she is proud to unleash unbridled love in the confessional clout of Nightskin, featuring Dave Steel on harmonica and dobro, as well as on Little Girl Lost and King Tide. And there could be an even higher goal here - a biblical peak climbed in the imagery of Solid Ground.

Like so much of the purest music created in this radio backwater it's another worthy contender for sleeper of the year. So who does Yeaman sound like? Well, listen to original cuts of so many folk and country hits before the studio doctors drain their lifeblood for the droogish demands of the industry. Nail a heathen to the cross and indulge in Yeaman's 'Pure Motive'.
DAVID DAWSON