Helena Jesele - Sweet Sticky Fix

by John Clarkson

published: 27 / 2 / 2013

Label: World6
Format: CD

Fantastic debut album from retro-influenced Dublin-born, but now London-based singer-songwriter Helena Jesele

Review

Even at the end of what has obviously been a bad night, and carrying her high-heeled shoes sling-shot in her hand, Helena Jesele is an elegant and a classy figure as she struts defiantly up the road on the front cover sleeve of her debut album, 'Sweet Sticky Fix'. That sense of style extends to the album itself which, all washes of smouldering brass and tingling strings, takes its influences from 50's and 60's soul jazz, and the holy trio of Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. Jesele draws inevitable comparisons with Amy Winehouse with her retro sound. It is a fair, if however obvious likeness as Jesele also has a similar sultriness in her vocals, and Paul O' Duffy, who co-produced the album, also worked with Winehouse. While she nods openly at her influences, one, however, never feels with Jesele that she is simply just ripping her favourite artists off. She brings her own stamp of personality to 'Sweet Sticky Fix', which tells of two years in the now London-based Dubliner's life and convincingly tightrope walks a balance, often in the same line of lyric, between heart-wrenching poignancy and self-lacerating humour. The brash ‘Let the Game Begin’ finds herself dusting herself down after another romantic let-down, and responding by going out on the pull (“Wonder Woman is out again/Woken up from another disappointing man”). The melancholic ‘Lovesick Avenue’ updates Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Avenue’ with its chorus (“Welcome to Lovesick Avenue/It’s on the corner of Unrequired and Heartache”), while the title track captures the passion, but also the faint awkwardness of a first sexual encounter (“Show me yours/And I’ll show you mine”). By the halfway point of ‘Sweet Sticky Fix’, one is left wondering if Jesele has anything else to sing about than her admittingly rather colourful love life. Only ‘Pretty Pretty Lights’, about a trip to New York and her disorientation at being somewhere unknown, offers something different (“Pretty, pretty lights freaking me out”). Even here, however, as the next track ‘Girl in London’, reveals, this has resulted in another disastrous love affair, this time with someone already involved (“It’s just your girl from London calling/I know that I said I wouldn’t/But I have been climbing up the walls without you”). Her blunt honesty and her self-mockery at her own neediness, however, carry ‘Sweet Sticky Fix’ through. It also turns out to be an album about self-discovery. The penultimate track, ‘Higher Mountains’ finds Jesele, wearying of her own clinginess and knowing that she can do better walking out on a man who has mucked around too many times (“Think I am going to walk away/Show my love a better way/I’ve got higher mountains to climb”). On the last song, the jubilant and upbeat ‘Sun is Rising’, Jesele has started another new and tentatively hopeful romance, but also now knows that ultimately she has to rely on herself rather than anyone else to find happiness (“Leaving my past behind/Breathing in something new/I’ll break every chain that has tied me down/That’s what I am going to do/Waving that ghost behind/Looking for bluer skies/All that was lost has now has been found”). ‘Sweet Sticky Fix’ is an intense, but exhilarating and rewarding album from a highly promising new act.

Track Listing:-

1 Breathe In Love
2 Let the Game Begin
3 Lovesick Avenue
4 Sweet Sticky Fix
5 Angel Save Me
6 Pretty Pretty Lights
7 Girl In London
8 Smash My Heart
9 Higher Mountains
10 Sun Is Rising