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Review: Nerina Pallot's Lonely Valentine's Club
Indie | Wednesday 13th February 2013 | Laura
Valentine’s Day is coming, and Nerina Pallot has created the best soundtrack for it!
Yesterday I went to Nerina Pallot’s concert after having a chat with her, and I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t my first time though. I went last year to another gig she was playing in St. James Church, where she played two of her albums track by track. In this occasion, it was the Lonely Valentine’s Club tour, a bunch of special gigs she’s playing around the UK for all her fans and lonely hearts, now that St. Valentine’s day is approaching. For the occasion, she released yesterday an EP called Lonely Valentine’s Club with 5 love songs, not all of them with a happy ending, as she thinks most fairy tales (specially Disney ones) are cliché, she’s more of a Brothers Grimm person. I was really excited about interviewing Nerina, because I really admire her imagination and spontaneity. It’s like she suddenly puts on the stand-up comedian mask, to share her most intimate thoughts and experiences, and you get caught into her own personal world. As she’s telling the story, you can imagine her in a plane surrounded by people reading a magazine, all in the same page, where it says she is a heartbreaker, and then staring at her with a judgmental look. In a lonely heart’s environment, it’s good to feel that you’re not the only one getting trouble with love.
And what can I say about the music? Well I can’t be objective, because I just get hypnotized every time I hear her voice. It doesn’t matter if it’s accompanied with the beautiful melodies she composes and plays on the piano or if she mixes it with the rhythms of the acoustic guitar. I think she didn’t realize in addition to being a journalist, I was a fan, until she saw me in the first line with eyes wide open and a smile on my face, as the one you get when you talk about someone you are in love with. But, what can I say? Her voice is one of a few that touches my soul. I was kind of a late starter though, as I discovered her when she released her fourth album The Year of the Wolf. Maybe before I wasn’t ready to appreciate all that Nerina has to offer, like when you read a classic book, but you’re too young to understand the message, so you read it again after a few years, and it becomes a life changing experience. Now she’s preparing her fifth album. She said during the concert that she didn’t know if it was going to take six month or six years, but regarding to the fact that it took her just a day to compose and record my favorite track of the EP, ‘Love is an unmade bed’, I think it’s not going to take long. Aside from the new tracks, she also played a few favorites as ‘Sophia’ or ‘Put Your Hands Up’ (She didn’t play my favorite, ‘Turn me on again’, but we all know, in love you can’t have it all) and the audience in the Islington Assembly Hall where like me, merging with her voice full of feelings, picturing stories in their minds of heartbreaks, love encounters or just the eyes of the ones they love.
It was really a place to go with your partner, if not it could be a beautifully depressing experience, like travelling to Paris alone or watching Love Actually by yourself, because when you really enjoy something, you just want to share it, that’s a part of what love is about. If I was dating someone, we would have totally go to the Lonely Valentine’s Club.
By Laura Vila
@LaursTime
