Phoenix Williams: Wait And See
Arkade Records
www.myspace.com/phoenixwilliams
Here’s yet another young woman singer with a great voice and some fine songs to sing. It must be getting harder and harder to break into the market for young women these days. Once they were well in the minority and any good new voice could crack it, but currently they seem to have taken over and we, The Public, have got to find some way of sorting the wheat form the chaff. This is no easy task. The music press and the other media don’t exactly help as they always have their own furrow to plough following the agendas set by fashion and current youth culture. This often means their methods of selection mean they pick the pretty and trendy for promotion rather than letting quality or originality be their guiding forces.
Phoenix Williams seems to be one quality performer who has cracked it though judging by her current CV of appearances etc. It helps, of course, that she is young, pretty and trendy too. But, for me, what stands out is the amount of hard work that must have gone in to producing this album.
The quality of production is blatantly outstanding and the playlist is cunningly constructed with the placement of the most original tracks at the beginning. Sure, it finally settles down to some more conventional balladic standard rock numbers but before it does one is captured by the range of Phoenix’s musical styles and abilities to know that here we have a star in the making.
I’d like to think that a period of consolidation will now follow keeping Phoenix in the landscape of the public’s eye but without too much pressure to put her into the central limelight of widespread tabloid press coverage. She needs to be kept out of the more torrid areas of the music biz and be allowed to develop her skills as the all round musical performer and entertainer she clearly has the potential to be. I hope her aspirations and those of the management (who, it seems, are already doing a good job) lie in the direction of long-term success rather than instant stardom.
This is a solid, well-crafted album that deserves widespread recognition. I look forward to a bright future for this young woman and, given the right handling, foresee an outstanding career ahead of her.
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