Sophie Koh – All Shook Up

All Shook Up – Sophie Koh

by Aidan Roberts

Sophie Koh. She’s a bit of an elusive figure in the current indie singer-songwriter arena, quietly plugging away making her records with a soft-touched confidence. Her second full-length record is a concept album of sorts; chronicling her descent into discomfort and back out again, Sophie sings of her trials and tribulations in recent years through family, personal relationships and an apparently quite nasty tennis accident. “I’m better now, I can be so careless,” she sings on the title track, with open-palmed frankness, an approach which makes the songs on this album refreshing and likable in their non-pretentious conversational manner. Sophie’s songs also traverse an unexpectedly adventurous melodic curve – see Objects In The Mirror and the interesting Chinese tone poem Gan Lan Shu (Olive Tree) – which blends very well with producer J. Walker’s skewy corner-store sounds and genius arrangements, very recognisably from the Machine Translations camp. Sophie’s musical world is one of subtlety not showiness, and with this album she’s definitely taken a step closer to greatness.

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