Bella And The Bear

A Girl Called Bella

(bellaandthebear.net)

A boy/girl acoustic duo: you expect The Civil Wars, you get bits of Kate Tempest. That’s the download generation for you, lifting influences from across genres, marrying them in the same song. This five-track EP from the Ayr’s Lauren Gilmour and Stuart Ramage is fleshed out with band set-ups and production by Hector Bizerk’s Audrey Tait. At the heart of it, though, is Gilmour’s formidable voice: a soulful powerhouse that can create tender harmonies alongside Ramage’s none-too-shabby vocals but also rise to the heavens in a scalp-tingling blues wail, before slipping at a moment’s notice into half-spoken-word, half-street-rap poetry. Little Boat and Passenger provide the most intimate moments; Paper Planes sets a catchy tune to a skippy drum beat, with a nice lazy drag to the delivery of the chorus; Magaluf walks a jazzy walk. In many ways track two, Skeleton, is the stylistic highlight but it’s also the most frustrating thing here, chopping and changing too much, fitting in an admittedly gorgeous bridge that disrupts the natural build up of the song.

Alan Morrison