★★★★
Beth Hart has been steadily dropping albums since the ’90s, and goddamn ifFire On The Floorisn’t her best yet.
A lot of records purport to take you on a journey – sailing through various genres and tempos, pushing and pulling, the whole fire and ice game. But it’s a rare gem that makes you feel that you’ve actually arrived somewhere new.
These songs are so seductive and well crafted that it’s outright jarring to move on to something else. Album opener ‘Jazz Man’ is a deceptively straightforward jazz fusion number, but once that voice hits its stride you know you’re in for a hell of a ride. Skip back and forth across the album – ‘Coca Cola’ to ‘Fat Man’, for instance – and it isn’t just the versatility of tone that leaves you impressed. It’s almost as though Hart has access to a wardrobe of different voices; unmistakably her, but put to strikingly different use from track to track.
Hart has an earthy timbre that can suddenly leap to such soaring, searing notes you can just about feel them. Look no further than the epic ‘Love Is A Lie’.
There’s still a few months left of 2016 and Fire On The Floor has a good shot at being one of the year’s top releases.
Beth Hart’s Fire On The Floor is available now throughProvogue/Mascot.
