Devon SprouleKeep Your Silver ShinedReview

Though still only 24, Devon Sproule's Keep Your Silver Shined will be her fourth album. Her last, Upstate Songs, was listed as one of Rolling Stone’s best albums of 2003 and I can only see this one making more of a splash.

Sproule grew up on communes in Canada and Virginia with her musician parents and started playing in a local mall for spare change as a teenager. The autonomy this upbringing bestowed on her from a young age – for example leaving high school early to dedicate her time to music – certainly comes through in these very original, carefully crafted songs (she apparently spends about a month writing each one).

Sproule has called this latest her ‘getting married album’ and it is both more settled and more playful in tone than her last instalment. The style ranges from the melancholy vintage-country of ‘'Dress Sharp, Play Well, Be Modest'’ to the whimsical ‘'Let’s Go Out'’, written in the style of a slightly twee but very endearing jazz standard. Elsewhere on the album are hints in turn of Django Reinhardt and Gillian Welch.

There’s plenty of harmonica, fiddle and banjo for the folk/country fan, but what comes through more strongly than any genre is the personal stamp of Devon herself; beautifully sparse arrangements like delicate spun-sugar constructions, and melodies that surprise the ear when you first hear them, but which then get under your skin much more than anything more obvious would.

Another joy is Sproule’s mellow voice and delivery which deftly balance country/folk solidity with jazzy sophistication.

In many of the lyrics Sproule summons up a rather idealised picture of Virginia and the laid-back country lifestyle, ‘watching the screen blow in and the / hummingbirds swarm’ and ‘the sun spread thick on the worn out lawn’.

But it’s all rendered so eloquently and delivered so unaffectedly that it’s extremely difficult not to buy into the dream; one can only believe that this sparkling young musician is following her own call to enjoy life to the full; ‘Let the humidity curl your hair, / And the mulberries stain your toes’.