NEW ALBUMS
JENNIFER CASTLE
Camelot PARADISE OF BACHELORS
Enthralling and richly detailed career peak from undervalued Canadian songwriter.
By Rob Hughes
THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
“What percentage am I spirit?/What percentage is machine?”
HISTORICALLY, pop music has often reached into Arthurian legend for a handy metaphor. It is, after all, a symbolist’s paradise – the enchanted vale of Van Morrison’s “Avalon Of The Heart”, for instance, or David Crosby’s Californian hippie dream reflected back as “Guinnevere”. The Moody Blues’ spellbound evocation of Camelot on “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”, perhaps. Or, more literally, Rick Wakeman’s preposterous chainmail folly on ice.
This ongoing thread of references in song – from Nat King Cole to Nas, Stevie Nicks to The Streets – tends to follow a pattern. Much like its depictions in literature, television and film, Camelot is invariably viewed as shorthand for a certain kind of glorious perfection, a mythic crucible of courage and nobility, the embodiment of utopia.
Monty Python notwithstanding, of course.
By contrast, Jennifer Castle’s Camelot, as mapped on her seventh album, is something altogether more nuanced. Hers is a battleground of opposing tensions, set against the divisive times of the present. There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions.