Imelda May, Mayhem

“The London-based Dubliner is an imperious, take-no-prisoners personality who can certainly electrify a tune with the tigerish yelps and whoops that run deep into the marrow of the blues. In fact, on the moodier pieces, May has a tone that slightly recalls Carmel, the singer whose raw, somber songs have aged well in the past two decades. Like Carmel, May writes the bulk of the material and impresses with both melody and lyric, none more so than the hard times chronicle of Kentish Town Blues, which smartly distills the realities of life at the low end of the social scale, right down to “those stews that lasted three days into four”.

Mayhem effectively proves that Imelda May is an artist of real substance and it will be interesting to see how she develops in due course, for as much as she has the rock‘n’roll template down pat it would be a shame if it became a sine qua non. There are times when the band slides into Cochraneisms that border on pastiche, but several others when the arrangements tilt into a pleasingly undefined stylistic space and suggest that May could be more than a retro queen who can sport a quiff with style.”

-BBC Music