Beat Magazine Melbourne - Review
David Dawson, June 2004

MARCIA HOWARD
Burning in the Rain

When Shipwreck Coast singer Marcia Howard cut her second solo album long after a six-year sojourn with Goanna she enjoyed the luck of the Irish.Marcia was touring Ireland with Mary Black when Nashville bluegrass aces Tim O'Brien and Jeff White fronted in Dublin. Producer Steve Cooney enlisted the duo to play fiddle and mandolin and sing on a disc that also boasted Black and a brace of Irish musicians.The expatriate Australian also played guitar,bass percussion and didgeridoo as Howard returned to her ancestral roots in song.And its that beatific hybrid of folk,country and Irish music that makes this one of those joyous sleepers of the year. Howard,like the best writers, bares her soul on a disc whose therapeutic theme may or may not be recovery from divorce and white hot ashes of love.She exorcises faded love in the entree title track and provides shelter in spiritual healing of Stonewall. They segue into the Howard-Black collaboration on William Blake poem Poison Tree,reprised from compilation disc A Womans Heart-a decade on.

The haunting leaving song Angel Full of Grace is a sibling of sorts of the highly personal Lonely for Love.Brother Shane's tune Your Love is a perfect segue to Like A Girl Again- a post divorce gem-and the optimism of healing in Holding On.

A revamp of The Morning Star as I Don't Mind is a sardonic stab at a departed lover.Whether the interpretations are right or wrong matters little-this is one of the best female albums of the decade.

Howard breathes new life into Donovan classic , Catch the Wind and finishes with Sorry- a personalised comment on stolen generations from her outback teaching and Warrnambool childhood-and Cooney instrumental Caoineadh Cholmcille.

Howard deserves airplay and exposure on a much broader tableau than the unlucky radio country can offer-a genuine diamond in the rough.