FEATURE: Spotlight: Laura-Mary Carter

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Laura-Mary Carter

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ONE of the things with half of a duo…

going solo, is that their new endeavour often gets compared with their duo work. A bit like Jack White following The White Stripes, Laura-Mary Carter is always going to be tied to her duo, Blood Red Shoes. To be fair, the Brighton twosome are still going strong (and they have a new album, Ghosts of Tape, out on 14th January). I think that the work of Blood Red Shoes sharpens and expands because Carter stepped solo and produced this incredible debut album. More of a mini-album, Town Called Nothing, is one you need to get. Although it won some positive reviews, I think that it was underrated and deserved a lot more praise than it got. An exceptional composer and artist, I think that Laura-Mary Carter will keep releasing solo material and expand. Despite the fact Blood Red Shoes have been together for years, I am spotlighting Laura-Mary Carter, as her solo career is relatively new. Among the absolute best and brightest of 2022, I am excited to see what comes next from Carter. A remarkable musician and inspiring human, I feel that Town Called Nothing is just the start of a glittering solo career. Rather than spreading herself thin, as I said, Blood Red Shoes’ music benefits from Carter working solo. Also, her solo material is more assured and strong because of her experience with Steven Ansell.

I am going to mention and include a couple of positive reviews for Town Called Nothing. Before that, there is a recent interview from Louder Than War, where Carter talked about her mini-album debut:

“Laura-Mary Carter, one half of the mighty Blood Red Shoes, is set to release her solo debut album “Town Called Nothing” on 3rd December.

Andy Von Pip had a chat with Laura- Mary about going solo, Jimi Hendrix’s bedroom, starting a podcast, and returning to touring with Blood Red Shoes.

After 17 years alongside bandmate Steven Ansell as part of acclaimed duo Blood Red Shoes, Laura-Mary Carter is releasing a mini debut album “Town Called Nothing.” To be clear this is not a collaboration, this is very much all Carter’s work and it’s a beautiful album tinged with a wistful sense of melancholy. The stirring title track also encapsulates the sense of displacement that runs throughout the album. “To be honest I’d written these tracks before lockdown” explains Carter. “But with all our gigs cancelled it gave me time to work on them and record them”. The title track certainly demonstrates Carter’s vocal range and shows a softer side which isn’t perhaps apparent when singing and shredding as part of Blood Red Shoes. It was also the first track she wrote for the album, “ I suppose it does capture the essence of the album, a sense of abandonment of heartbreak and restlessness. I seem to have an inability to stay in one place, and I guess the songs do reflect my true self. ”

Carter’s nomadic lifestyle was influenced by her Irish family when she was a child. They moved around to the extent that she was the only one of three siblings to be born in the UK. As a teenager, a Tarot card reader once predicted Carter’s wanderlust. “I mean I know a lot of that stuff can be nonsense” she laughs “but that tarot reader really did say a lot of things that made sense later. Like saying that I’d travel lots but only stay in places for a day, which is very weird as that basically is my life on tour.” Carter has performed well over 1000 shows all over the world and sometimes can spend more than 250 days a year away from home.

After taking a break from Blood Red Shoes Carter moved to L.A. but even there she was constantly on the move exploring new environments. She eventually paused at one place which had a battered acoustic guitar hanging on the wall, with a couple of missing strings. Unable to tune it properly she started writing. “It was strange that the music I wrote at that stage came out sounding like it did because I’d never previously considered myself to be an Americana fan.” She reflects “ However since writing the album I’ve discovered lots of things I do love about the genre. So it will be interesting to see what my next album will sound like.” Despite the Americana flourishes and country leanings, there are still moments that recall Blood Red Shoes such as on one of the album’s standout tracks the cinematic “The City We Live In.” “I guess it’s bound to seep in somewhere” reasons Carter “but I did try to approach this album in a different way than I would do writing for Blood Red Shoes. I also wanted to explore my voice and use it as more of an instrument. I mean I’ve always been in a band as part of a duo with Steve since my teens, and I’m certainly the more reserved one. So I wanted to break away, to find that voice, but not break from my band because I love Blood Red Shoes. But it’s important as you progress as an artist to have another creative outlet. When I write for Blood Red Shoes we both know what we want it to sound like, but outside of that Steve and I like very different music. He’s brilliant at electronic production whereas I love singer-songwriter stuff like Elliot Smith”.

As well as releasing her solo album, Carter is back with Blood Red Shoes next year who are releasing a new album “Ghosts On Tape” on Velveteen Records. The band have previously released records via their own label which they started for a variety of reasons and Carter admits “we are a bit control freaky and if you’ve been around awhile the industry can write you off. They are obsessed with new, new, new all the time so we just thought, “who else is going to do it?” We always found that when working with people in the industry, they just didn’t care as much as we did. I find it different in the States, but in the UK it’s the negativity that bothers me. The default response seems to be “no, you can’t possibly do that!” Nobody has the drive to do stuff.”

And as you might expect Carter has also missed performing live and touring “I arrived back in the UK last year and it’s the longest I’ve been in one place for ages, so touring with Blood Red Shoes in 2022 should help assuage my restless spirit. I’d also love to play some shows in support of my own album.” For her solo work, Carter put together a band composed of Seb Rochford (Polar Bear, Electric Ladyland, Patti Smith), Jack Flanagan (The Mystery Jets) and Patrick Walden (Babyshambles). During Lockdown they recorded a live session at Jimmy Hendrix’s flat in Bond Street London. “We were all like wow this bedroom has such a vibe. It’s been restored to exactly how it was when he lived there. I’d previously visited it with a friend who is much louder than me and she was saying “you should play here, you never push yourself.” So she went and asked the people who run it. The original intention was to do a small gig there but Covid happened so we did this live session instead. It would be great if I could keep that band together for a few shows in the future. And then I’ll make another album. “Town Called Nothing” is essentially a mini-album, but I’ve plenty more songs written so hopefully, I’ll be recording them later in 2022”.

A remarkably interesting and nuanced mini-album, I do think that some critics were a little short-sighted when it came to Town Called Nothing. It is among the best debut works of 2021. This is what The Skinny observed in their review:

“For long-standing followers of Laura-Mary Carter’s work, there shouldn’t be anything too surprising about the direction she’s taken with this first proper solo release (too long to be an EP, too short to be an album). We already know that hooks and melody have always been at the heart of her band, Blood Red Shoes; they are disciples of Nirvana, in that they’ve spent the past 15 years perfecting the art of cloaking smartly-constructed pop songs in riffs, reverb and sheer volume.

The slow-burning atmospherics of the band’s softer moments – from When We Wake to Beverly via Slip Into Blue and Stranger – have already shown us that Carter is a multi-faceted songwriter (as, for that matter, has the power-pop of another of her offshoots, Shit Girlfriend). Yet the six tracks of Town Called Nothing still feel disarming; the countrified breeze of the title track, the woozy almost-folk of opener Blue’s Not My Colour, the softly epic reflection of Better On My Own. Only closer Ceremony really nudges towards Carter’s grungy rock bread-and-butter; on every other track, she’s taken ambitious stylistic risks, and they pay off handsomely. This is a hugely accomplished solo debut”.

Laura-Mary Carter’s incredibly rich and layered songwriting is all over Town Called Nothing. Go and give it a spin and deep listen if you are not aware of it. An artist who is going to keep releasing brilliant music through this year, she is someone to watch and celebrate. To end, there is one more review that I wanted to introduce:

“Laura-Mary Carter is, perhaps, more familiar to At The Barrier regulars as one half of Brighton alt-rock duo Blood Red Shoes. In her Blood Red Shoes guise with band partner Steven Ansell, Laura-Mary has been touring the world for the past 17 years and the duo have, in the process, released five albums, with a sixth, Ghosts On Tape, scheduled for January 2022. Town Called Nothing is, however, Laura-Mary’s solo debut, and it will come as quite a surprise to anyone expecting more of the loud, guitar-led, almost punky sound that they’ve come to expect from Blood Red Shoes.

The inspiration for Town Called Nothing came during a between-tours sojourn in Los Angeles, during which Laura-Mary indulged her twin passions for songwriting and incessant travel. Taking the advice of a tarot reader in Venice Beach, she headed out into the wilds of Arizona to “find her heart,” and came across a ghost town with the memorable name of ‘Nothing.’ “It was simply fate,” says Laura-Mary.

Laura-Mary takes up the story of the journey that inspired her album: “It started in the real town called Nothing and then it became a sort of obsession, because it’s a completely abandoned town and I kept going back and wanting to find more of these places. Someone once told me I am a love addict and this felt the same – feeling pulled back to places, even though you know there is really nothing there.” And those sentiments are echoed repeatedly throughout Town Called Nothing, as Laura Mary sings, using varied moods of mysticism, detachment and desperation, of love, desolation and abandonment – just as she found in that old, abandoned, town that inspired her to write.

The music takes in doses of folk, alt-country, indie rock and electronica and the sound is sparse and even quite other-worldly. Laura-Mary’s vocals are emotional, ethereal and often ghostly and are, with a couple of startlingly intimate exceptions, fairly low in producer Ed Harcourt’s mix, and the overall impact recalls, as much as anything, Kate Bush in her Hounds Of Love heyday.

Blues Not My Colour gets this six-track mini-album underway; it’s a song with a nice country feel, intimate vocals, a tapping rhythm and the bass right upfront in the mix – a device that Ed H utilizes pretty consistently throughout the album. And Blues Not My Colour establishes the theme of break-up that Laura-Mary returns again and again…

The dreamy Signs is, perhaps, the album’s most other-worldly track. Synths and a loping bassline provide the background for Laura-Mary’s expression of abandonment – an emotional outburst that ends with the stoic conclusion of “Well that’s the way it goes, I suppose…” As a complete contrast, Town Called Nothing, the album’s title track is instant and upbeat, peppered with jangly reverb guitars as it tells the story of the town’s discovery and the irresistable pull that it exerted on Laura-Mary. Town Called Nothing is, probably, my favourite track on the album and I particularly like the song’s closing line: “Get in my car, let’s drive to nowhere,” which Laura sings in the most blissful of laid-back voices.

The jangly, indie feel is retained for Better on My Own, yet another break-up song, with Laura-Mary’s desire for freedom expressed in the ghostliest of voices, as if her words are swirling around inside the head of her jilted partner. The anguished, haunting, The City You Live carries the theme of separation forward, before the album is closed by the ominous Ceremony, the song on which Laura-Mary gets closest to the spirit of Kate Bush. Over a spooky bassline and a soft drumbeat, Laura-Mary sings of betrayal and regret. Her voice is distant and anguished, as if she’s singing from the very eye of a violent storm, and the song’s long, slow fade-out, drenched in howling guitar notes and quivering string effects, is positively unnerving”.

One of my favourite songwriters and musicians, the amazing Laura-Mary Carter has a busy year ahead with a new Blood Red Shoes album, touring the album and, perhaps, some solo gigs too! I am excited to see how she follows Town Called Nothing. If you are hunting for exceptional and promising talent, then make sure that you keep Laura-Mary Carter…