ROOTS HIGHWAY - Italy
MARISA YEAMAN 'Pure Motive' (Deep Pearl)

Marisa Yeaman's school has been the road, abused idiom this one, but more than ever fit for her. The sense of travelling, physical and mental, is mirrored in her curt folk songs, with some country blues fragrance between the lines. From the vastness of the Australian continent, Yeaman arrives to our acquaintance, after the duration of a decade. In fact it was not until 1996 she embraced the career of musician, at the encouragement of colleagues. Defined one of the best secrets of the scene of Southern Capital, Melbourne, Marisa now delivers her first serious offering 'Pure Motive' after three Ep's prior.

For the recording of these thirteen ballads she has collaborated with some great players, including the excellent Andrew Pendlebury to the guitars, Ed Bates to the pedal steel, Rob Tabuteau to the dobro and the bluesman Dave Steel to the harmonica and dobro in the bluesy Nightskin. She has decided to follow a personal and brave path on this record, far away from musical business flatteries and close to her own sensitivity as an artist...'Pure Motive' encloses therefore "the pure" sense of making music according to an author of good hopes.

Expressive voice, even though not prodigious, markedly acoustic settings and folk roots (see the opening with Watching Fire Burn and Holy Water and also Vacant Sign, King Tide and Little Girl Lost), Yeaman's record maybe is too monochord in choosing the arrangements, but it shows noble and classic ballad songwriting. Grown, by her own admission, with the sounds of the West American Coast of the seventies, and manifesting a love of the sweet melancholy in numerous melodies, in among songs like Didn't Mean To Fall In Love and Damned if you Love Me (strong debts, especially in the first one, to Joni Mitchell), and the consuming Lonely Puppet on piano. On the rare episodes that it detaches itself from the wefts of folk: another side is shown in Solid Ground, rounder and rockier than the rest, although there remains a nearly maniac attachment to acoustic treatments that certainly give homogeneity to the record, but they also make it too rigid in some points.
Fabio Cerbone - www.rootshighway.it