A thing about Polly Scattergood...

A while back, readers, The Lipster (amazing amazing amazing) did a thing about the WORST music act in the WORLD. They were searching high and low (i.e. on myspace) and they came up with some truly horrible horrors. German rappers, Iranian boybands, Christian rave bands etc. etc. etc. And then there was Polly Scattergood.

The whole Polly Scattergood thing is very confusing for the following reason: We SHOULD like her. To elaborate: she is a female singer/songwriter with a thing for poetry. Unfortunately Polly Scattergood is apparently extremely depressed. Either that or she just wants a load of attention for ACTING depressed. Almost every single one of her songs contains allusions to killing herself. And not in marvellously original ways, either.

We're all for depressed (female) musicians... and often they can make rather good music. When Tori Amos was at her bleakest and clearly most disturbed, she was making the best music of her career. Björk has done some great stuff clearly inspired by feelings of deep sadness. So has Kate Bush! And let's not forget Robyn's "With Every Heartbeat" which is one of the most marvellous and most depressing songs of all time.

But Polly wants to beat us over the head with it. Or rather, breathlessly serenade us to death with it. She wants us to give her pills so she can go to bed. She bleeds everytime you kiss her apparently. She has a dark place. She writes poetry about "fake fucking people who drink all the gin". She has a habit for recording startingly non-original phrases like "I miss you" and "Where are you?" all breathy and having them echo as if she is uttering something extremely poignant and important into a big empty cave OF DOOM.

And this sort of irks us.

Unfortunately it's not all bad. In amongst the horrifyingly immature lyrics about DYING and KILLING ONESELF there's some rather good production going on, on her album. One song builds up with big squelchy synths and another has some rather good melancholy strings. The piano is alright, and her vocals (whilst an acquired taste... if you ever acquire that taste) are sort of all right, in a kind of 'Joanna Newsom and PJ Harvey's transgendered love child' sort of way.

So we're kind of confused. On one side: childish pretention and terrible lyrics, on the other: rather nice production, the occasional melody and a sort of listenable voice. We wonder how this will pan out (i.e. if it actually WILL pan out at all). She went to the BRIT school but unfortunately has not received much, if any, hype and nothing she's done seems to have caught on much.

We hope she carries on creating, as long as she grows up a bit but we have this left to say: she is not and never will be Kate Bush. She makes Florence and the Machine look very tolerable.