Nerina Pallot – Stay Lucky

Peter Buck maintained that R.E.M., mindful of repeating themselves, would consciously make each album as a response to their last. On the evidence of her career to date, Nerina Pallot shares the band’s artistic imperative. Stay Lucky, her sixth album in a fifteen-plus year career, rebuffs the playfulness and sonic adventuring of 2015’s The Sound and the Fury in favour of the elegant balladry that perhaps best represents her singular aesthetic and inarguable song craft.

Impeccably conceived (a good handful of these songs would earn a place on a Pallot best-of) and expertly rendered (expansive string arrangements, exquisite piano throughout), Stay Lucky’s high spots dazzle. Come Back to Bed is a sweet riposte to the ribald sass of Geek Love from her sophomore record Fires. For Pallot, this is her “death and shagging record” and her lyrical concerns take her from the world outside her window to the one between her sheets.

But it’s the heartfelt title track that will prod the tender heart: ostensibly a love letter to her young son, its musings on mortality ('And the greatest trick of life is thinking we’ll never die') sit shrewdly counter to its musical setting: a sweeping Laurel Canyon vibe Pallot so deftly adopted on 2011’s career high Year of the Wolf. As ever, pigeonhole Pallot at your peril – she remains one of our sharpest observers and one of our very finest freaks.

Listen to: Stay Lucky, Come Back to Bed