ANNABEL LAMB
'ONCE BITTEN'
(A&M AMLH 68555)

I think I'm falling in love again.
Maybe I've been a little bit in love with very girl singer I've ever listened to - From Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw to Keren of Bananarama and Patti Palladin. Annabel Lamb is a blind date, yet already I know from repeated plays of "Once bitten" that she's a soft, sensual seductress.

With a voice that drips with honey-coated tenderness over a crushed heart of bitter experience, she transcends the accepted limits of female vocalists and instead (like Grace Jones, like Marianne Faithfull) she immerses herself in the emotions of her music.

A song such as "Take me in your arms" evokes a wistful melancholy desire for love and lust that far outstrips the trite limits of a "love song". It aches for physical reassurance, throbs with a need for warmth and affection, yet has an indefinable romantic quality of sheer pleasure through the fantasy longings of the lyric.
There's a tremendous human frailty at work here; the sympathetic, supportive understanding of lovers' failures and regrets: not in any slushy, over-sentimental manner - sure, there's a lot of sentiment, which is a different thing altogether - but with the cold, steely-eyed logic of one so shattered by betrayal that tears are a thing of the past.
The blue-hued sleeve starts the muted mood that is somehow articulated more poignantly by the wailing saxophone on "Dividing the spoils of love" than even by that song's explanation that "it's too late now, I'll be leaving soon, I can hear the car, All these rooms seem strange to me."

In truth, with her weary down-trodden desire for love in danger of being smothered by continual dismay and distrust, Annabel Lamb shares more with Ellen Burstyn in alice Doesn't live here any more than with any other pretty young torch chanteuse.

Even amidst such reflective mournful material - and the quality of her song-writing is wonderfully strong- Annabel retains and unbowed spirit that boasts both the rough edges that make Grace Jones such an exciting interpreter of emotions and the smooth sensuality that Annie Lennox brings to the Eurythmics' glowing music.
With songs like hypnotic instrumental "Snake Pliskin" and "Backwards through the looking glass", Annabel Lamb is a talent to be cherished. And loved.

JOHNNY WALLER