The Arts & Culture Journal

Heg’s music is a conflict of tension and resolution. Her barley-dressed piano arrangements are haunted by distant cello and backing vocals, and whilst minimalist in themselves, stand as incriminating evidence of the full blown orchestra-that-would have-been had they not “lost [their] way in the woods” or got trapped down some phantom mine.

Take This Sickness (Butterflies). The piano lines jitter and babble over each other with all the nervous energy of two bad chat up lines incomprehensibly inter-spliced and translated into piano scales. Hegg’s charming vocal delivery reinforces this effect beautifully, she scans her lines as if it’s the first time she’s ever read them let alone sang them, and that is to say it’s a masterful illusion of incapacity to communicate. In the songs final minute the stop start time signature disintegrates into four/four picked out on cello and the stuttering melodic phrases, all of a sudden, make perfect, uplifting sense.

Similarly in Red the songs seemingly confused stumbling through the minor key is just a calculated rouse to lead the listener into the darkness of the wood the songs character faces. Devoid of any sonic landmarks to take comfort in or cling to, when Heg shows us the road into the sunshine we naturally take it as the song modulates into it’s glorious middle eight and we are told “don’t hear the howl”- still unsure of whose interests that instruction might serve.

Heg’s perfect diction does at times threaten to rob the song of it’s danger and turn it into an Andrew Lloyd-Webber interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood. Like wise with the dark mournful soul of Evelyn’s Song, which whilst gorgeous, leaves an unbalanced deficit between the pains suggested by the lyrics and realised in the vocals. However Hegg’s talent for unobvious melodies that startle at first only later to provide the symmetry and proportion of the songs in their final evaluation, redeem any hang ups we may have about enunciation.

Heg defies lazy comparisons to Regina Specktor and her ilk and on the strength of what we’ve heard so far Heg might just have found a place in musical landscape that she can call her own and that others can compare themselves to, rare. 

www.myspace.com/hegdoughty
www.hegdoughty.com

Text by Will Kerr for Fallyrag