Album Review: Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia by Hannah Peel

Hannah Peel’s Awake But Always Dreaming was one of last year’s unexpected highlights. The Magnetic North singer’s second solo album was a varied, personal, and deeply sensitive electronic portrait of dementia, with catchy pop songs to boot. Her third has hence been seized upon with enthusiasm by RC’s caged scribebots. Mary Casio is another cohesive collection, glued together by the slightly silly yet still thought-provoking storyline, which regards the life story of an obscure imaginary electronic composer, who is set upon space travel. The elephant in the room is Peel bizarrely opting to barely use her commendable voice on this latest musical conception.

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Telling the enchanting story of an elderly stargazer from Barnsley who dreams of flying to outer space; Hannah Peel’s new album is an intelligent marriage of orchestral and electronic sounds, bringing neon-tinged notes together with sweeping, wondrous chords from a 29-piece colliery brass band. The album lifts-off with “Goodbye Earth”, a series of arpeggiated notes which could quickly become cliché in the wrong hands, but as the electronics fade and reappear from the abyss, they are joined by the full force of the 29-piece band. Occasionally the electronic sounds can seem too familiar and overused.

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