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The chiming mandolins and rolling fingerpicking of opening song Ten Light Years declares Caroline Trettine's colours even before her clear and fine voice pitches in with images of walking on air and a place on the bill at the Cambridge Folk Festival is made almost certain. Produced mainly by ex-Blue Aeroplanes' Richard Bell, Trettine's record contains little of that band's fire, preferring instead to rest with a kind of delicate, daisy-chain wistfullness. What it does share with those Bristolians is a literary fascination that has driven Trettine to take poems by Apollinaire, Pablo Neruda, Andrew Marvell and Tennyson and shape them into songs. They're poems about doomed and desperate love, about life cut short and they speak of an urgency and vitality that is noticably absent from Trettine's sweet-natured and pleasant, but, in comparison, pale music.

Martin Williams
CWAS #7 - Spring 2001

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