Deborah Bonham - 'Duchess'
On face value it would be reasonably simple to dismiss this record out of hand as a case of better-late-than-never coat-tailing. Such charges have probably passed their use-by date however considering that the younger sister of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham first dipped her toes in the cloudy waters of the musical mainstream back in 1985 with her UK debut ‘For You And The Moon’. Although Ms Bonham achieved a perfectly respectable helping of accolades for that effort, the business side of things apparently didn’t agree (for her and everyone else for that matter) and it wasn’t until 2004 that she released a follow up ‘The Old Hyde’.
‘Duchess’ then is her third album, covering in its thirteen tracks a smorgasbord of genre held together by some plucky vocals, touching on the majority of significant styles of the half century in a mish-mash of rock, blues, soul and country. With a voice of ripe maturity, Bonham imbues her songs with the kind rousing, wide-eyed optimism that is apt to descend in the early hours after the consumption of a dozen Jack Daniels and Coke in a blue-neon lit biker bar. This is especially apparent on the bluesy rock of tracks such as ‘Pretty Thing’ or album opener ‘Grace’, Bonham letting rip against some foot-stamping rock. The simmering soul ballad ‘Love You So’ burns with seething emotion, while ‘Hold On’ oozes with not entirely off-putting sentimentality, Bonham fervently urging the listener to ‘hold on to what you’ve got / ‘cos what you got is a lot’. Will do.
The main problem with the album however is that rather than sounding like the vibrant musical expression of Bonham’s uniquely contemporary voice (or something along those lines), it sounds like the re-release of something that’s been suddenly discovered lying dormant on some forgotten jukebox in a small town pub since the mid-eighties, its main appeal thus being to people who live in a permanent state of nostalgia for that decade. Also, the songs start to blur together after a while, converging on a middling uniformity which becomes very easy to tune out. ‘Duchess’ isn’t without its place, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better elsewhere.