album review: various artists, sweet little bird
Female musicians are not a genre, nor are they sweet little birds. However, if you were trying to gauge as much from listening to this compilation, described as ‘a collection of songs from the world’s finest female storytellers’, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Rather than featuring a broad collection of music whose only commonality is that it all happens to have been written and composed by females, Sweet Little Bird instead only showcases a particular kind of female musician. It essentially demonstrates how comparatively easy it is to find an audience if you’re a woman and play folk/mellow/acoustic/indie pop music; I’d never previously realised how similar Holly Throsby, Julia Stone, Carmen Townsend and Sarah Blasko all sound, which just makes it seem like a lazy and convenient compilation.
Having said that, it is nonetheless compiled quite well: both discs flow through the songs and artists, rather than suddenly jarring you into a completely different mood. But that’s also what makes it kind of unremarkable. Even the inclusion of Lily Allen fails to make it any less monotonous, as it’s not one of her sassy songs that makes it on (à la ‘Not Fair’), but ‘Chinese’: a midtempo love song about eating takeaway and napping.
Granted, there are some lesser-known gems to be found if you listen all the way through (namely, Jill Barber and Shelley Harland) but really, it’s all just smooth background music that fails to give due credit to the impressive talents and back catalogues of any of the artists.
If you like some of the artists featured on Sweet Little Bird, you’ll like Sweet Little Bird. But you’ll also already have just about all the songs on it.
