Music > Album Reviews

Kathryn Wiliams - Hypoxia

26/05/15

Hypoxia = lack of oxygen to the body, potentially leading to suffocation. Bell Jar = laboratory device for creating a vacuum.

This, Kathryn Williams' twelfth album, is a beguiling and melancholic homage to American poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath, and in particular her novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963. Initially commissioned as five songs to mark the 50th anniversary of Plath's book, the project grew into Hypoxia, produced by Ed Harcourt and featuring the haunting 'Cuckoo', co-written with him. Williams' enigmatic yet gentle voice has a steeliness and an edge this time round that resonates throughout as she sings of Plath's suffocating descent into depression whilst enduring professional constraints within the patriarchal world of 1950's America, themes explored semi-autobiographically in The Bell Jar.

Whilst tracks such as the upbeat The Mind Is Its Own Place conclude in a message of positivity, and the final track Part of Us has a gentle country feel, there are plenty of darker and more desperate moments, as in the resentful Tango With Marco and the wistful resignation of Beating Heart.

Hypoxia is Kathryn Williams' 'tour de force', a sensitive and empowering tribute to the life and legacy of  Sylvia Plath that will further raise awareness of the need to de-stigmatise mental illness in all its forms.

9/10