Love Your Dum and Mad begins with this insistent clanging; it's guitarist Simon McCabe hammering away on a zither, making some industrial-grade din-- the noise perfectly mimicing a train crossing signal. It's an anxious sound, the soundtrack of impatiently waiting, of staying clear of a powerful, inevitable force that could crush you. The jing-jing-jing of this lasts for the nearly four minutes of the album opener "Aching Bones", a dark droning concoction of martial drums, blown-out bass, and pricks of parlor piano. All is static until Nadine Shah arrives and unfurls her velvet voice, singing of a love that destroys-- and setting the tone for a dark record that does not relent.
Much of Shah's press attention's referenced some fantasy patrilineage, that she sounds like the product of a PJ Harvey/Nick Cave union. Like Harvey, she sounds mournful, powerstrutting between lust and vengeance-- regardless of what she's singing about; the sang-froid and cruelty that cut through Dum and Mad is perhaps where the Cave's distilled from. But Shah's actual lineage sheds more light on her sound: growing up Shah's Pakistani father sang Urdu ghazals around the house, a form of Arabic poetry about love and loss. Most every song on Dum and Mad is about a love that was, a past that poisons the future, and being undone by the true nature of a love. She sings in the now about what went wrong-- the memory propelling the misery.
The album's second single, "Dreary Town", a recollection Shah wrote of an ex-boyfriend two days after his suicide-- one of two dead friends she pays tribute to with the album-- is just about it's only point of light, though in a backwards sort of way. "I'm not going to follow you to the ground," Shah sings. In the first verse she outlines what they had as kids, broke but happy and in love in London. Unlike the rest of the songs, she's not yearning for what they had. The track has an odd melancholy to it, a looping 3/4 of vibes and music box melody, lonely guitar notes-- it sounds like a carousel. All the little details get swallowed up in the natural reverb (half the album was recorded in a textile warehouse, including this track). The din rises around the hiccuping rhythm, until Shah lets loose-- the jagged vibrato at the top of her range recalling Diamanda Galás at points-- as her voice comes to full power. "Darling, I'm leaving," she howls, all emotion but still in total control of her voice, smearing the words for a measure. She's choosing to live-- that's all she can do now.
On "To Be a Young Man", she sings as a man with his youth and all it's privilege and ease far behind him. "Oh to be a young man again," she sings drawing the "o" long in her Northern accent, moaning distress until it almost sounds a little obscene. "There were hopes and dreams that we locked up and hid," she intones. Her voice is rapturous, the desperation in her voice allowing her inhabit characters completely-- whether she's playing the venomous housewife of the nearly perfect "Runaway" or the pliant lover on "All I Want", boasting "I'm all that you want."
Dum and Mad is blood-red gothic, desperate loves, and bitterness-- much more fully-fledged than you'd expect a debut to be. Producer Ben Hillier doesn't carve out a lot of space for Shah in the songs, but she takes it. The sound of the album is heavy, claustrophobic even; reflecting the subject matter, sounds double back, pile up, and refuse to fade. The arrangements are simple, usually just piano, bass, guitar, drums, and some bits of feedback or guitar scuzz saturating the mix for emphasis. It's all baroqueness and black clouds, and Shah low voice, purring, like she is trying to beg the moon down from the sky. For all of Dum and Mad's unebbing intensity-- it never gets overbearing, it retains a dynamism through Shah's magnetic voice-- she makes you want to stay in the darkness with her.
