Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Rumer Live on Jools Holland!
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Daily Star Review
RUMER'S FIRST LONDON GIG: BLOOMSBURY THEATRE ENTRANCED
THIS velvet-lunged lady will be labelled dinner party music by some sniffy critics.
Whatevs. She has a voice that could melt butter and lightly toast muffins.
And her self-penned songs have romance written through them like Blackpool through a stick of rock.
This was her first big London gig, and you could tell.
Endearingly awkward, she tugged at her dress, teetered on her heels and regularly draped her hair across her face.
But her voice was faultless, especially on the deceptively sweet Slow, which is all about stalker-ish infatuation.
When she announced her “last song”, her enraptured audience booed, to which she replied: “But, we were going to come on and do one more.”
After the “one more”, this rookie diva was duly given a standing ovation.
Review: Rumer, Bloomsbury Theatre, London
Reviewed by Enjoli Liston, THE INDEPENDENT
Rumer's story has all the hallmark highs and lows of a fairy tale. After 10 years on the pub circuit, working jobs from popcorn vender to iPod mender, and coping with complicated family issues, Rumer has finally been rewarded with an Atlantic Records deal, rave reviews, and the icing on this rather sweet cake? Burt Bacharach flew her to his home in California, just to hear her sing.
Rumer (aka Sarah Joyce) is clearly well on her way to stardom. Yet the Anglo-Pakistani beauty is visibly shy as she stands timidly on the Bloomsbury Theatre stage. She winces in the spotlight, as she thanks the audience with sincere disbelief for managing to sell out the venue in just an afternoon. That the credit could be hers doesn't seem to cross her mind.
Nerves keep Rumer's ability reined in at first, but it's already evident that the recurrent comparisons to Karen Carpenter are not misplaced. With her eyes cast downwards in sadness and hands pleading, her vocals on "Am I Forgiven" are a deft blend of bright, shining delicacy and the darkness of genuine heartache.
Wrapped in a turquoise Seventies-style dress, her voice oozes maturity beyond her 31 years on the stunning single "Slow", the first release from her forthcoming album Seasons of my Soul, which is released on 1 November.
"This is the last song," she declares, after barely 40 minutes. As the audience vent their disappointment loudly, she looks sheepishly to her pianist for the lead on whether she can appease them with the songs she has "kept up her sleeve".
"I do feel like a little girl wearing her mum's shoes," she says shyly, before tackling her heroine Laura Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic". She is stunning, mastering the fluttering inflections with perfect ownership, and – most of all – she is comfortable at last.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Guardian Review Rumer Live.
Rumer's pristine voice – a dead ringer for Karen Carpenter's – is best suited to the kind of luxurious easy-listening treatment that sold millions of records in the Carpenters' glory days but is now as antiquated as the vinyl LP. Nonetheless, a major label has decided there's a gap in the market, and, surprisingly, they seem to be right: her first headlining show sold out the day tickets went on sale. "Nobody expected it," she told us. "It's incredible."
It was clear she wasn't prepared for sudden success. Wearing a blue dress straight from a 1970s coffee morning, she moved stiffly, and groped for things to say between songs. (Her ultra-confident pianist had less of a problem there.) But it just emphasised the point that Rumer has nothing to sell but her voice, a warm, golden instrument that feels like an anachronism in the age of Auto-Tune. Matched with lush backing from an eight-piece band and material that made the most of it, her voice glowed.
Her delivery was poised and leisurely as she glided through most of her upcoming debut, Seasons of My Soul. The cocoon she created was so cosy that the melancholy trickling through the lyrics passed almost unnoticed. Aretha, for instance, is about a schoolgirl with "no one to confide in" but the soul singer on her iPod, while Slow runs: "You make me want to sing about love, even though you don't want to know." And that was the show's one real problem: Rumer enfolded us in emollient, mono-tempo music, and never upped the pace. She needs to rethink the set. Even the Carpenters demurely rocked out now and then.
At ABC, Glasgow (0844 477 2000) on 15 October. Then touring.
Monday, September 13, 2010
New single "Aretha" to be released Oct 18th
Rumer announces debut album - ‘Seasons Of My Soul’
Album out November 1, new Single: ‘Aretha’ - October 18
Rumer will release her much-anticipated debut album, ‘Seasons Of My Soul’, on November 1 (Atlantic Records). Already a firm fixture in the pre-order charts, it will be preceded by the release of a new single, ‘Aretha’ on October 18. This will follow the A-Listed success of her ‘Slow’ EP (which reached Number 1 on ITunes) and a sell-out debut show at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre on Tuesday, September 14.
An Anglo-Pakistani singer and songwriter, many will already be familiar with Rumer’s first single, ‘Slow’: a smouldering unrequited love song, with a stop-you-in-your-tracks vocal that saw radio producers inundated with phone calls, asking what they were listening to. It became the surprise hit of the summer, and is an introduction to an array of classic yet contemporary pop songs. Musically, ‘Slow’ – and much of the album itself - is influenced by Rumer’s upbringing, which takes in a childhood spent in an enclosed, exotic expat colony in Pakistan. Here, her family would often sing and write songs together, determined to provide their own entertainment in the absence of TV or newspapers. Then, they relocated to the New Forest, where Rumer first saw a television, and married her love of the folk tradition with the sweeping melodies of the technicolor movie musicals. It is a blissful harmony, which you can hear in the likes of ‘Slow’ and ‘Come To Me High’.
Behind Rumer’s great voice is a significant amount of emotional depth, in part signposted by the album’s startling opening lyric: “I lost my heart, I didn’t know what to do,” she sings, against the soaring melodies of ‘Am I Forgiven?’ Lyrically, the album resonates with several key moments from her life: from her parents’ painful separation to the time Rumer spent living in a caravan to be near her dying mother, via a decade spent slogging away on the acoustic scene, working as everything from a pot-washer to a popcorn-seller. Yet the record retains a sense of mystery – and a fondness for strange imagery – that prevents it from becoming merely autobiographical. ‘Healer’ is a still, simple and stunning piece of songwriting, on which Rumer asks Time itself for a change in fortune, whilst the classic, soulful pop of ‘Aretha’ interweaves her relationship with her mother into the tale of a girl seeking solace in Aretha Franklin: “mama, she'd notice but she's always cryin'/ I've got no one to confide in / Aretha, nobody but you."
Rumer’s debut, then, is a sometimes dark but ultimately uplifting record, made around the time that her luck began to turn. She wrote the beautiful ‘Blackbird’ in a colourful hippy commune in the countryside, where – having fled her various London jobs - she lived for a year alongside a debonair, philanthropic baronet. It was the song that proved to be her turning point. Returning to London, determined to throw herself into the music, she met, by chance, award-winning TV and musical composer Steve Brown: perhaps known to most of us as the face of Glen Ponder in Alan Partridge’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. Brown quickly became Rumer’s somewhat surprising choice of producer, and has helped shape the subtle sounds across the album (from the pin-drop beauty and lyrical optimism of ‘Thankful’ to the rousing, singalong-in-waiting, ‘Goodybye Girl’).
In March 2010, almost a decade on, Rumer finally signed to Atlantic Records. She soon began to reach ears as influential as Elton John and Burt Bacharach, the latter of whom was so blown away that he invited her to his Los Angeles home, just to hear her sing. It is these pinch-me moments that you’d be hard pressed to deny Rumer has earned, not in the least because of the timeless quality of this debut album.