Album Review: Mia Dyson - The Moment

It's been five years since Mia Dyson's third studio album Struck Down brought us another facet of the husky-piped blues and roots chanteuse. She offered us only a brief reencounter with her Urthboy collaboration for 2007's highly-rotated hip hop/blues fusion track Over Before It Began, before jetting off to the States to reconnoitre a new fanbase and bust out a track with Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, whose reported intentions for Dyson's career courted some acrimony. Regardless, it seems Dyson soaked up more than LA sun on her US jaunt; The Moment is awash with much more clarified song structures with much less dirty blues than her former releases. On the whole, it works.

Lead single When The Moment Comes kicks things off in the right direction, with the focus on Dyson's brooding morning-after vocals building on top of her band of galloping drums, resonating guitar chords and wandering piano lines. The slow burners like The Outskirts Of Town and Dancing On The Edge find their niche in the album's midway point, allowing Dyson to reinforce the slightly more late-night-in-a-strange-town, cigarettes and whisky crooners with some hooky melodic lines meandering over a fairly paced and restrained rhythmic backing. Cigarettes ushers a more heady rock back into the album with a bit of Americana thrown in using ballpark keys, and Dyson's stamp is all over album closer Two Roads, her soft inflections between rasps are spine-tingling and a sweet juxtaposition over a piping harmonica.

Overall it's a refined outing but what's lacking most is that raw, dangerous, dirty soul at the heart of previous Dyson fare, and in turn the sauntering troubadour sound of old is sadly affected.