Topic: reviews
Kyra Shaughnessy has a gift. No doubt she’s practiced and honed her performance, and she has worked on and thought about what she does, but she also completely lucked into That Voice. Versatile, pliable, honey-sweet, with consonants that have just enough of a burr to suggest the organic quality of a vintage 30s recording.
The first time I saw Shaughnessy perform was at the ShapeShift tour at Collected Works in September. She opened with a piece of short prose from one of her zines - something about unrequited love - and while it was sweet and seemed endearingly innocent and honest, I wasn’t particularly blown away. Then she stood up and started a sung and spoken piece called “Take Me Away” and my jaw hit the floor. The first comparison to enter my head was Billie Holiday, and that’s still the closest I can come to the sweet, intimate quality of That Voice.
Shaughnessy’s CD, “As Children We Knew The World Truly,” is spare and gorgeous. Completely a capella, it moves between spoken and sung poetry. She hangs onto rhythm and pitch without backup music or any tricks, and her melodies are innovative without losing beauty. It’s one of the few completely a capella voice albums that I’ve listened to repeatedly in one day. “Take Me Away” is on the album, and for that alone it’s worth picking up. The sung hook line - “take me away / take me away / take me away, I wanna go back to the place I know / away, away, away-a-way-a-way, way-a hey, hey” - is so memorable and catchy that I caught myself singing it to myself as I was falling asleep that night. It takes a jazz riff, repeats it almost till it becomes a mantra, and then breaks off into something that echoes Native American chanting, if not blatantly, and then brings it back to that soft jazz croon.
Her spoken word poetry plays with the usual breaks, rhythms and rhymes, but as with the sung work it’s the jazzy, swingy sound of her voice that seduces. “And So It Was” is a song that wants you to fill in your own mental orchestration to go with the vivid images, “Lovers of QM & Economics Unite” picks up the tempo and gives her a chance to voice act as well, while “All babies are born (singing)” is a meditative, purely sung, piece that floats along on its own pace.
You can contact Kyra Shaughnessy at unchainthemelody@yahoo.ca for the CD - only $5 - or look her up in Montreal.
