Eliza Carthy
Angels & Cigarettes
Warner Bros.
If Tori Amos had studied violin instead of piano, she might have sounded a lot like Eliza Carthy. After a couple of indie releases, Eliza Carthy has broken out with a major label release. Angels & Cigarettes is a beautiful, captivating record, accentuated by superb production values. Produced by Al Scott, the disc fuses classical, folk, and pop elements together into a dense, evocative sound. But the strength of her music isn’t the arrangements, but the lyrics. Her songs are deceptively lovely, often laced with painful pearls of truth. It’s the “spoonful of sugar” theory at work. Give you something pretty, then hit you with something you might not like otherwise. It’s quite effective, and makes Eliza Carthy’s Angels & Cigarettes a really solid, interesting album, perfect for a rainy late afternoon.
