Flo Morrissey & Matthew E White - Gentlewoman, Ruby Man review: ‘bewitching’

As collaborations go, the musical marriage between the privileged Notting Hill daughter of a global investment manager mother and Buddhist monk father to a buccaneering Virginian hipster is hardly obvious.

Yet they’ve channelled the maverick spirit of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra to make a bewitching covers album.

The selections veer from trite (Barry Gibb’s Grease theme) to obvious (The Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning), but they radically re-work Frank Ocean’s Thinking ‘Bout You and take a majestic trawl through James Blake’s The Colour In Everything.

The unifying threads are the voices: Morrissey’s throaty warble which adds even more glow to Little Wings’s sunny delight, Look At What The Light Did Now and White’s understated rasp, which gives a wry air to a project that merges craft with glee.

(Glassnote)