Leche

The last time Meredith Godreau recorded and produced songs in her bedroom, it was 2006, it was pop music, and Gregory & The Hawk became an internet sensation, selling tens of thousands of digital copies of her single virtually overnight. For follow-up Moenie And Kitchi, Godreau entered a proper studio with a host of collaborators; supporting the record, she toured the US supporting Mum, Frightened Rabbit, Mice Parade, and Album Leaf, among others. In 2010, Gregory & The Hawk returned to the bedroom. Her third full-length, Leche, finds her peeling back layers of production, of emotion, of space between herself and the world, to find a raw honesty. This more stripped-back approach allows the stunning voice of a clearly gifted singer to shine through, unabated; complemented rather than obstructed by the harps, guitars and creepy sonic knick-knacks that have found their way in. This is not pop music. Leche demonstrates the distance Godreau has travelled from the gentle, hook-centric simplicity of her earlier material, but her peerless grasp of head-bobbing rhthyms, ear-piquing hooks, and otherworldly, punctuating noise snippets clearly remains – keeping the listener humming along through even the darker bits of her latest effort.