Ramona, the third album from Melbourne belter Grace Cummings, feels at first like a possible masterpiece, a new apogee in the pantheon of tormented soul. Across its 11 allusion-rich character studies and screeds of lovelorn retribution, Cummings renders every moment with unmitigated emotional intensity, as though every feeling were the last one that would ever matter. Hear her grow, for instance, from long-faced tenderness at the start of “A Precious Thing” to an operatic mercenary howling about love. “But it’s nothing I care about,” she roars like Diamanda Galás on a Disney ride designed by Dante. Or witness the cracks in her voice as she surges beyond an Amy Winehouse coo during “Something Going ’Round,” testaments to the self-doubt ingrained in this opening love letter. Built by a band that has clearly studied the Wrecking Crew’s glories, and gilded with strings and harp, Ramona holds a singular and mighty voice in a spectacularly grand frame, not unlike Rufus Wainwright’s Want One or Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising.
But you know that friend who you love seeing for an hour every once in a while, who shares everything new about their life in an exhilarating but exhausting torrent? That could be Ramona after repeated spins, when Cummings’ lack of restraint, combined with the band’s hidebound insistence on repeating sounds that are often 60 years old, becomes too taxing to take for very long. After self-producing her first two records, Cummings linked with Topanga Canyon vintage king and session ace Jonathan Wilson, who freed her to focus on not holding back. That is commendable, but it results in an album that has the dynamic range and limited application of a strong flashlight. You recognize its incredible power, but you’d do best not to stare into the source for very long.
Cummings is not shy about courting legendary company. After all, the protagonist of “Ramona,” a smoldering pseudo-goth number that ultimately flames into a full torch song, is borrowed from Bob Dylan. (She summons him again for the number’s finale, with sneering repetition that mirrors “Just Like a Woman.”) There’s a bit of Johnny Cash’s “Cry, Cry, Cry,” toward the end of “Everybody’s Somebody,” which borrows the sound of Memphis’ Stax rather than its Sun to impugn a wayward partner. She lifts from Townes Van Zandt during “Without You,” where she again flips Dylan lines twice. There are glimpses of Nick Cave and Nancy Sinatra and, in the album’s closing verse, Cummings quotes standards from Dylan, Neil Young, and George Harrison, like some thrift-store magpie. The band, led by Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Drew Erickson, responds in kind, stitching clear threads of Radiohead, Phil Spector, Hal Blaine, and Chris Isaak into these songs.
As with Ramona itself, these references first seem remarkable, the group’s audacity commendable. An homage to “Wicked Game” as a preamble to “Common Man,” Cummings’ romantic cowboy portrait? Those impossibly tense strings that Radiohead favor as a bed for “Work Today (And Tomorrow),” a fiery ballad about the endurance of modern survival? Cool! But it soon becomes clear how gestural this all is—that Cummings, Wilson, and company are a crew that will repeatedly point to the classics they love without finding new depth for them. There’s not a sound or story here you haven’t heard done better elsewhere.
So we’re left, then, with Cummings’ voice—a truly dazzling instrument, with the heft of Nina Simone’s and the height of Angel Olsen’s—to carry Ramona anywhere else. And goddamn, can she sing. That growl toward the back of “Help Is On Its Way,” that bluesy scorn at the middle of “Everybody’s Somebody,” that hall-filling howl leading out of “On and On”: She is a consummate technician with an enormous range and an identifiable grain. In those moments, Ramona still lands like the masterpiece it initially resembles. But it overpowers these rather skeletal songs and, over very little time, overwhelms the listener, too.
Ramona is perfectly emblematic of the sort of singer-songwriter record that seems to be creeping into ubiquity and that Wilson tends to specialize in—big and unabashed, where every sentiment appears illuminated by massive stage lights. (Cummings, for what it’s worth, is also an actor, which you can sense as Ramona starts to wear you down.) Subtlety, intricacy, and delicacy are horse-traded for bombast. Is this a symptom of streaming and the attention economy, where it takes a little oomph to rise above the background hum? Or is it instead a symptom of songwriters trying to add something new to a form two or three times older than they are and deciding that the simplest way to fake it is to crank the volume? In either case, chockablock with theater-kid gusto and references to aged idols, Ramona’s instant magnetism slowly starts to seem like just a dream, a vacuum, a scheme.
