Blue Car is the most recent album from Glasgow-based painter, poet and musician Joanne Robertson. Its eleven songs are a selection of unreleased work over the last decade. In each song Robertson sets out to capture the emotional poignancy of a single moment. Blue Car is full of empty space, distant voices and rough, beautifully layered guitars.
Three sounds structure the album: Robertson’s voice, her guitar and the white noise that surrounds them. Jeans opens with ambient fuzz, taking the listener to a somewhere peaceful yet obscure. Each of these songs maps somewhere new, eleven different spaces and memories, moments and places that echo around you. We as the listener follow the music as it flows between states of consciousness – Robertson creates something hypnogogic on Blue Car. Not quite a dreamscape and not quite folk, it is music that drifts. Like listening to a very talented busker play from around a tunnel’s corner in a tube station.
The album is intimate like its songs are being played to a loved one. We are invited into this world of intimacy from the opening track. A world of ghostly voices which ring out on the edge of understanding – we are able to catch only fragments of Robertson’s words. By fragmenting our ability to gain a lyrical context we are confronted more with the emotional aspects of Robertson’s exceptional voice and cycling guitar riffs. I was unable to pick up on most of the lyrics and found myself left with just their shadows, enjoyably lost in the sounds passing gently by in Blue Car. It feels sort of like you’re listening to music in a language you feel like you’ve learnt – you feel like you should be able to understand the words but only manage to catch a few syllables of each. This effect is felt more on some songs than others. In Crossroads I could appreciate Robertson’s lyrics more. Lyrics like
“You’re always there […] like a devil in the wind in the rain / You were shame / Three in the morning”
I really like the way she sings these lines.
The songs Jeans and If It Feels are highlights for me, coming back-to-back at the end of the album’s first half, though the album is really too formless and vague to be halved. Jeans features Robertson’s diaphanous vocals and nervously descending guitar lines. It is the most songlike song on the album. The guitar hops around and sounds deeply uncertain, and when you cannot make out Robertson’s vocals it is usually because she is humming rather than the fact that they are lost in a mixture of white noise and guitar. If It Feels is a hollower and more understated song than Jeans. Robertson’s telephoned vocals persist for the song’s near 6-minute runtime but engage you leading to a song that is very good to stare out of a train window to. My favourite moment in this song, and one of my favourites on the album comes exactly in the middle where there is a brief movement away from the repetition of the main guitar riff. The guitar rises to greet you, before falling back into the song’s slightly sombre rhythm.
I listened to Blue Car on a strangely warm December morning on the way to visit my girlfriend. In the dregs of a cold, coughing in a Southern Rail carriage, Robertson’s dreamy and opaque album complimented the weird state of illness that I found myself in on the weird green train.
Joanne Robertson’s Blue Car is very, very pretty, it’s probably an old blue corvette. Her vocals are moving and her use of guitar and white noise creates a hypnotic soundscape that is easy to immerse yourself in. I did find it could feel slightly repetitive at points because of the sonic similarities between songs’ instrumentation and construction. But within these songs you can find beautiful variation on subtle levels. The album’s beauty comes in its subtlety, in the attention that you have to pay it. I’ve tried not to avoid using the word ethereal in this review for some reason, but Blue Car is certainly that. It sounds like the Cocteau Twins if they listened to folk and all they had access to was a guitar and a mic they had to stay a metre away from. This is fey music, gentle and otherworldly, but comforting and homely at the same time.
maxim knowles 
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