Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It might seem like a sense of discordance when we think of pathos and humour as being emotionally tied, aligned by words of opportunity and direct opposition, but tragedy and time are more than friends, they are the Muse to which we seek a truth, that everything in life can be found to inform, enlighten, and provide comfort…pathos and suffering, humour and wit as one.

It is in the hands of Roberta Smith that such an appeal of wide-ranging emotional concord is to be found as she unveils her new E.P., Humdrum Five, a collection of tracks which take in the sparkle of the new and the creativity of the remix of the previously unreleased, and such is the combination of the tracks that each one is sighted with the polish of the beautifully disconnected, of the alienation of the mind and the drama of the everyday; the fierce pound of the beating heart as it suffers under the weight of normal expectancy and the sense of delirium it bathes in when things go slightly askew.

The point of linking such polar opposites is to show to the listener that which is always appreciated, engagement with the everyday, the dull, the consistency of the monotone twenty-four hours, because in that one spark of personal revolution, when things slide a second out of phase with what we expect comes brilliance, comes beauty, comes the unexpected cool.

Those five tracks, Humdrum, Five, The Secretary Song, Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son, and Somebody Else’s Child, refuse the sense of boredom so often pertinent in our lives, and add a gentle explosion of colour, a quirk in time that the day will rise to the occasion with and vanquish the routine with a devastating blow.

Roberta Smith’s Humdrum Five is one of those great moments that make the day that much better.

Ian D. Hall