ANGELS & CIGARETTES

Eliza Carthy
(Warner)

RATING: three and a half

This is probably the worst album sleeve design I’ve seen in a long time. The cover features the blue-haired Eliza Carthy staring blankly into space, sitting on a dirty marble staircase overgrown with vines, her toes uninvitingly curled and legs turned inward. Behind her, the city skyline looks fake. I can remember only one other CD with design this bad, and that was Red Rice, Eliza Carthy’s previous 2-CD special. I’d spotted its ad in a music magazine years ago, and it was ugly enough to make me stop turning the pages, stopping for a full ten minutes just to marvel at how singularly, extraordinarily, gut-wrenchingly bad the whole thing was.

So Eliza Carthy has a talent for bad CD design. Fortunately, her music is good enough to forgive the cover and even the gruesome fashion shots inside—which really is no mean feat; these pictures are really, really, really bad. You wouldn’t believe.

Thankfully, the tracks on Angels & Cigarettes are nothing like its album cover would suggest. As Carthy’s debut outside her native UK, Angels & Cigarettes introduces her as a likeably eccentric folk singer with a gift for weaving modern influences into her lush music. Armed with a violin and a sharp pen, Carthy plays like a loonier Sarah McLachlan with a Yorkshire accent.

Synthesizers, strong beats, and the generous use of strings give the songs a lush musical bed to lie on, giving the folksy core of her songs a modern veneer. Carthy’s lyrics are also very versatile, graceful in its narrative one moment, before lobbing in a few spiky lines for surprise the next. “Train Song,” for example, is a love song with unusually rich imagery that can tell stories in the space of a verse: “But I think that stitches will mend him/ And his feet choose a path that they know/ Looking from his bedroom window and falling in love.” Lest you think that she’s all New Age-y sugar, though, Carthy right around and mocks the genre on “Company of Men,” with its dramatic orchestra and melodramatic harp faking right, before abruptly goes left with the mock-sweetly sung, “I’ve given blow jobs on couches/ To men who didn’t want me anymore…/ My evenings have passed me by/ ( a confusion of lies and loose flies).”

The 10-song collection is surprisingly broad in texture and mood, as Carthy draws on a whole range of experience—musical as well as biographical—for her songs. Gentle love songs sit side by side with caustic observations on life, and through them all Carthy displays a deft songwriting hand. The album is also remarkably well-produced for somebody who isn’t being pushed by her record label all that much. It makes you wonder how much better she could get if the label pumped in more money.

It should tell you something that Red Rice was nominated for a Mercury Prize in 1998, despite the stunningly bad cover art and Carthy’s young age (she was 24 then). It would be a shame if this talented songwriter’s career is sunk by bad marketing and ugly album covers, because Angels & Cigarettes, which marks only the beginning of her international career, is already a mature work that surpasses those of many other artists working in the mainstream. So while her art director should be shot, Eliza Carthy deserves a legitimate shot at mainstream stardom.—Kristine Fonacier