On Justifying Your Longings to the Doctor, Swales accompanies herself with nothing more than her own acoustic guitar, a ploy that does well to highlight her decidedly sonorous voice and places a premium on her words — which are in no short supply here, as she ruminates on everything from politics to lost love to her Welsh grandmother. It wouldn’t hurt her to self-edit, at least a little, since there are enough annoying vocal ornaments here for an entire aria, and without enough hooks to go around, things get a little tedious by the time she’s asking abstruse and abstract questions about why men climb mountains and the like (on “Hundred Thousand”). The Australian Ani DiFranco she ain’t, but Swales shares with DiFranco the peculiar talent for verbal insurgency, a way of packing songs so full of words that their lives seem to depend on it. And if it sounds like she started with the words and came up with her melodies as she went along, that’s alright — this is folk music for non-hipsters with enough patience to listen to an old-fashioned yarn. – Christian Hoard
more »