Like a crocus peeking through late-February snow, Catherine Howe's voice emerges tentatively from beneath the lavish orchestration of What a Beautiful Place, her long-lost debut album. For nearly 40 minutes and 10 songs, she must contend with an armory of strings, horns, woodwinds, timpani, bells, whistles, and piano that move with fluttery energy, suggesting an album bursting with ideas and fearing stillness. Occasionally, the woman at its center sounds overwhelmed, but Howe strikes me as too precocious and self-confident to let herself be upstaged. So it's possible that this dynamic between singer and arrangements is intended as metaphorical, evoking a young adult awed by the beauty and bustle of the world.
That would make sense: Howe was 20 years old in 1971, the year What a Beautiful Place was released, yet she comes across not as older or younger, but surprisingly ageless, as if she could be singing these songs at any time in her life. Nevertheless, this work is most certainly a product of its time, which gives the Numero Group's typically top-notch reissue the feeling of a time capsule. On songs like "On a Misty Morning" and "My Child", the florid production, courtesy of nomadic musician Bobby Scott (who collaborated with a range of artists, from the Hollies to Louis Prima) and featuring the London Symphony orchestra, stems from the hippie folk of the previous decade.
The album's strong sense of artistic purpose, evident in the spoken-word passages that now sound like yesterday's pretensions, grows from the same creative soil that cultivated Donovan's flights of nearly unbearable fancy and Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day. Howe doesn't have Bunyan's sense of graceful melody or playful lyrical voice, but the two albums sound similarly earthy. "Up North", which starts the album after a brief prologue, paints a bleary but evocative picture of Howe's native Halifax, UK, "where the people smile their grimy smiles." The songs that follow trail her to England, where she wrote most of the album. That sense of place instills the music with a strong meditative quality at odds with Scott's arrangements.
When the orchestra falls away, however, and leaves only a live band behind, as on the percussive title track and the barroom-bluesy "The Innocence of a Child", What a Beautiful Place points ahead to the more austere singer/songwriter folk-rock era of the 70s. Howe's precise phrasing and her sense of formal orderliness recall Carole King, whose landmark Tapestry was released the same year. "Nothing More than Strangers", with its soft bed of strings and Scott's burbling piano, is a starkly confessional break-up ballad, and stand-out "Words Through a Locked Door" recounts the sad tale of a girl institutionalized for heartbreak; the song is whimsical, sure, but Howe's carefully expressive performance and lyrical detail lend it unexpected gravity.
As the reissue liners recount, What a Beautiful Place sunk the independent label Reflection Records, which was barely able to release the record. Howe would record four more albums during the 1970s and another in the 2000s, each of which remains in print, if only as an import. So this reissue is a career lynchpin restored, a portrait of the artist as a young woman still finding her own beautiful place.
