Ginger Quiff namesake Carol Hodge recently released her fifth studio album in the shape of the personally relatably titled EffortLess InSecurity. As I’ve now come to expect, this is another fine example of her elegant and empathetic wordsmithery. EffortlLess InSecurity is perhaps her heaviest album yet, and not just from a musical genre perspective, where she has shifted gear once again with the record having more of a stoner rock edge while in places taking on a soaring extravagance like an ostentatious Queen epic, but also in the deeply affecting and personal lyrical content.
Whatever direction Carol takes with her music, the enduring core of her sound will always remain, with her incredible vocal and piano always sitting front and centre and carrying the bill of the emotion. So for every full on crunching rock epic like the opening track, the incredible Manoeuvres, the song which introduced her new harder edged sound earlier this year, and the Led Zeppelin-esque heavy riffs on recent single Small Crumbs, there is an emotionally wrought bared-soul torch song like I’ll Do The Begging.
There are songs on the album, like the entirely relatable The Queen of Fitting In, that blend the two seamlessly, the song opens as a heartfelt laying of cards on the table showing the vulnerable insecurity of the albums title, before the mighty crescendo of a chorus, a powerful declaration revealing a show of public mask wearing and learning to deal with underlying precariousness of navigating every day life.
Drowning Rocks, is another intensely impassioned slow burner, with a guitar line that sits somewhere in a Venn diagram of Country, David Lynch and Soundgarden. “The rocks that you carry, are bringing us down” is the core theme, and the impact that has on relationships with others. Sometimes this makes the mask worn as the Queen of Fitting In slip, unable to deal with the everyday…”
Some of the albums highlights for me, in a year where despite experiencing one of my personal life highlights in visiting New York I have also hit some pretty dark lows, are probably the most impactful in terms of the affecting lyrical content. Gimme a Break could have been the soundtrack for a period during 2024 when life became too much, “gimme a break, it’s all too much for me, gimme a break, we all deserve reprieve..” sings Carol in the refrain echoing my sentiments.
There is an immense sadness on Last Day Pass but at the same time the song feels like it has a sense of hope that all is not lost. Perhaps the pinnacle comes with the albums closing track Ever Reliable Pain, probably the most personally open, raw and impactful lyric on the album, it’s pointedness made all the more effective by its sparse arrangement, just Carol’s emotive vocal and melancholic piano. Both hearteningly elegiac and wistfully elegant and captivating.
Once again Carol Hodge proves she is a formidable force to be reckoned with, and surely cement herself as one of the UK’s finest songwriters, hitting the mark with each one of these ten potent songs on her latest masterpiece, EffortLess InSecurity.