It’s the voice that first gets you: a soft gauze of a thing that slides in with the words like a snake on floor tiles. After the voice it’s the melodies that are ridiculously insistent and devious. About 10 years ago, shortly after the release, in the winter of 2014, of her fifth studio album, Bones + Longing, the Co Cork-based singer-songwriter Gemma Hayes went Awol. Like Patti Smith and Tracey Thorn, among many others, Hayes disappeared because she’d swapped songwriting, recording, performing and touring for raising her children. It has been a slow, perhaps anxious journey back to the point where she felt she had not just the time but also the inclination to look after her own needs as well as her offspring’s.
If the songwriting process is anything it’s a form of self-therapy. When child number two arrived Hayes decided to start writing songs again. “I found that when I was creative, I was a nicer person,” she told The Irish Times earlier this year. “I had more patience ... It was nearly meditative.” Meditative is a good word for the feeling of listening to the nine songs on Blind Faith, Hayes’s sixth album.
She has always had a knack for forging desirable nuggets out of pop’s most basic constituents. The album starts elegantly, with Eye for an Eye, an acoustic guitar strummed as Hayes sings of “lifting you higher” and how even in despair (“now the world is gone”) there is still hope. The second track, Central Hotel, is one of the best in her catalogue, part woozy reminiscence, part shoegaze, slow-motion reverie. It’s a wonderful song, based on her experience, about two musicians checking into the titular hotel, in Manchester, losing track of the time (“There’s a bang on the door, and your manager is ragin’. We race across town, and we’re late to the stage”) and advancing to some kind of mutual understanding about how fundamentally important music is to them (“We sing our little hearts out, the words reach their limit, and I feel alive”).
The album continues in a similar vein with songs that veer in style from folksy warmth to silky sandblasting, alternately urgent (Hardwired), angry (Feed the Flames), feeling loss (High and Low) and mesmeric (Return of the Daughters). “You can’t kill a hunger, the will to be free,” Hayes sings on Can’t Kill a Hunger. It’s a lyric that underlines her return – a return that to say was merely welcome would be to seriously understate it.
