Dani Wilde CD Review
Dani Wilde
Heal My Blues
Ruf 123
***
If ever an album was less in need of healing, it’s Dani Wilde’s HEAL MY BLUES.
The 21-year-old Brighton resident’s talent appears to be in rude
health.
Is it just imagination or are young British female blues singers more of the
exception than the rule? However, on listening to Dani Wilde it looks as if
Fatboy Slim has a rival as Brighton’s finest musical export.
There is a wonderfully unschooled quality to HEAL MY BLUES. It’s all a bit
chaotic which suggests that Wilde is playing from the heart rather than
what she thinks young blues singers should sound like. The natural power she
injects makes Testify for one, an explosion rather than a process.
Thankfully neither Wilde nor HEAL MY BLUES have had the life squeezed
out of them, I Hate You More Than I Hate Myself is built on a bedrock of
personal, still burning passion. Whatever else she is, as a performer Wilde is, at the moment, an untamed force of nature and long may she remain so.
That ‘force’ extends to the heart-rending I’m Going Down, which has been
wrenched, bloodied and beaten from the depths of a tortured soul.
Although it’s Dani Wilde’s name on the label, the album is a collective
triumph. Without Morg Morgan, Will Wilde, Mike Griot , Dennis Palatin and
producers Griot and Thomas Ruf, this could easily have been a run of the
mill tilt at short term commercial success. Instead it has a substance and
depth of feeling that belies the age of its singer.
Should HEAL MY BLUES fail to find the acclaim it richly deserves, Dani Wilde
can be content with herself in the knowledge that she has made an album worthy of her considerable talents. Somehow I think she’ll be alright. Michael Mee