Gemma Ray - Island Fire

‘Island Fire’ really embraces the concept of pop noir with a healthy dose of kitsch.

Drawing on genres firmly rooted in the sixties such as ye-ye, dusty bar ballads, girl group pop and even swamp rock, ‘Island Fire’ is at once sugary sweet and cartoonish but a touch disquieting. She masks not-so-pleasant subject matter with a gaudy exterior. ‘Put Your Brain In Gear’ sees Ray making what sounds like an incredibly veiled threat under the guise of slow burning doo-wop. The Morricone-styled orchestral swell in the bridge of album highlight ‘Make It Happen’ feels cathartic though she is impatiently waiting on someone to indeed make it happen.

Ray manufactures an aesthetic that could easily represent one idea of how the present day might have looked in the 1960’s. Aliens sounded like theremins. A song title like ‘Eaten By The Monster Of Love’ could easily be the name of those horror movies we now laugh at. Ennio Morricone’s iconic film scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns introduced a whole new way to represent epic drama. ‘Bring Ring Ring Yeah’ features a mischievous marimba breakdown. All of these things are present on ‘Island Fire’ and while they are still essentially pastiche, their charm is preserved in amber.

These artistic red herrings ensure that the album can be enjoyed on both a superficial and a deeper level. You can take each track at face value and appreciate them for their almost Stepford-sweetness or you can listen carefully to the lyrics and give the song completely different, and more sinister form. Such is the essence of pop noir, as it plays with well-worn notions of pop and flips them on their head. Ray is true to that sentiment by having fun with these ideas and subverting them in order to give life to her own narrative.

Like watching an established comedian inadvertently breaking character, there is an extremely satisfying sense of fun throughout ‘Island Fire’ (despite the dark content) and Ray is very much in on the joke.