Without Why

"Rose Elinor Dougall used to be Rosay Pipette. Tempting as it is to completely ignore all that in reviewing her solo full-length bow, the baggage suggested should be considered in terms of how difficult it can be to escape your musical past. While by no means a complete creative dead end, the Pipettes came with layers of deliberate stylistic contrivance - no band accidentally ends up wearing matching polka dot dresses doing synchronized dance movements, presented as they were as one man's svengali plaything with no shame. But as anyone these days coming across former members of the Darkness and Towers of London, stuck in hair metal/shock-punk limbo under different guises, will attest associations can be hard to shake off. There again, if you can attribute your past to a pseudonymic role it's easier to work out your true self. Without Why, a title derived from a poem by a 16th century mystic, allows Dougall to forget having to issue a cheeky grin mid-pirouette and carve a new musical identity deliberately based on everything but what she used to take after. Her full vocal range, for glaring instance, is something we've never really heard before because it's mostly been holding down three part harmonies. Quantifying what it recalls is tricky to exactly pin down - Siouxsie Sioux without the menace? Sophie Ellis-Bextor with emotion? It's not too far from cult late 60s English folk singer and acknowledged influence Bridget St. John. Whatever, it's a rich, adaptable tone, capable of switching from vulnerable and lachrymose to defiantly unbowed . . . At one reading Without Why is her attempt to make sense of the solitary world around her, getting to grips with young adulthood's new emotional charges and choosing to be careful about the future for the first time. There are traces throughout of bitter guilt and lacerating lack of self-confidence without lapsing into all-out dug in nails self-pity. It's more a yearning thoughtfulness, the yin of getting up, accepting and getting on with it against the yang of what has passed in some lost disarray. The production is sympathetic to the cause, fluttering and subtle where needs be, strident elsewhere without losing sight of the art of pop construction or held back melodrama at its core. As a statement in locking the back story away and making your own voice heard with all its perceived character flaws and underlying hope and regret, consider it a brave success." - Simon Tyers / The Line of Best Fit