All About Eve

The Lady of Shalott with a 4/4 beat

Review Score:

(8/10)
As if the Pre-Raphaelites had discovered rock n roll.

Picture a gypsy girl, legs dangling off the back of her wagon trilling folk songs which speak to a pastoral, idyllic childhood, while a team of muscular, well trained electric guitars pull the wagon through a cool forest glade of luscious production, leaves still glistening and dripping with the very latest in digital reverberation.

That's what All About Eve sounded like in 1988 - and that's what it sounds like now, the only difference being it sounded pretty cool back then. Now, it's as dated as a Camelot on Ice. Come to think of it, it's rather a lot like Camelot on Ice.

All the same, it's pretty music, and in tracks like Wild Hearted Woman and Martha's Harbour, has a commendable air of ballsy pre GirlPower feminism about it.

They're all great tunes, for the most part, and the best get well and truly anthemic (most notably Shelter From The Rain which, with its foreboding synth pads, shimmering acoustics and snarling guitars rumbles collossally across the soundscape as if Punk Rock had never happened). And the quieter moments stand up, and if anything outdo the bombast: Julianne Regan's almost unaccompanied rendition of the traditional She Moves Through The Fair is truly beautiful (if a little blighted by over production and what little arrangement there is behind it).

So it's difficult to isolate what hasn't lasted about the sound. I think it may be that it's just too earnest. All About Eve takes itself just a bit too seriously, which - when one is singing about gypsies, secret gardens and a brightly shining lady in the moonlight, is a bit rich - and it inevitably sees the band sail a tack too close to Spinal Tap's Stonehenge for it to be taken seriously, at least not once you've emerged from puberty and/or the Nineteen Eighties.

Still, when you put it on the shelf with its contemporaries - Queensr?che (note umlaut!), Poison, the Mission, the Sisters of Mercy - by no means is All About Eve a candidate for most embarassing record in the collection.

Pull the curtains, and no one will know you still listen to it.

Olly Buxton

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