Louise Dodds – All I Know: Album Review

By Gareth Allen on 26th March 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

On her new album All I Know, Louise Dodds delivers a set of outstanding vocal performances allied with expressive and heartfelt songwriting. A surefire album of the year.

Release date: 14th March 2025

Label: AMP Music & Records

Format: Digital download / CD / Streaming

A SONGWRITER AND JAZZ VOCALIST

Louise Dodds is a songwriter and jazz vocalist, who on her new solo album All I Know, delivers an impressive set of consequential songs and captivating vocal performances. At The Barrier previously reviewed the album Two Hours After Midnight, on which Louise Dodds together with pianist and arranger Elchin Shirinov, produced an enchanting collection of jazz-based interpretations of traditional Scottish folk songs. On this new album, they are again working together, with Elchin Shirinov playing piano and providing the arrangements. Additional accompaniment on the album is by Max Luthert on double bass and Dave Hamblett on drums.

As Standard is the song that begins the album. Immediately one is struck by the sympathetic space the arrangement gives to Louise Dodds’ vocal. The double bass is beautifully measured and the drumming subtle, with delicate splashes of cymbal. The rhythmic piano phrases are just perfect in lifting the music to match the optimism the song is built around. It is a very fine song with the vocal cadences capturing perfectly the sense of selflessly supporting growth and potential:

“Darling it’s time to welcome in spring

And winter fades as you reach for the sky

Things will be different but there’s nothing to be scared of

And anyway I’m here

I’m always here as standard”

Home is a song about coming home to someone who provides completely what you are looking for after journeying and searching. It has a wonderful rhapsodic vocal where the emotion of the song is given full flight and also features some finely detailed improvised vocal sections that really sparkle, and flow around the dramatic double bass figures.

GIFT FOR MELODY

Kindred Spirits is a fine example of Louise Dodds’ gift for melody, which carries forward the song with an irresistible flow. Elchin Shirinov’s improvised piano solo plays with the melody, empathically creating a feeling of warmth and understanding. This perfectly matches the song’s theme of moving through loss. The lyrics capture tellingly what can feel lost and yet can also provide hope for the future:

“Kindred spirits

Light up the sky

Fly through the night

The moon’s alibi”

COMPELLING QUALITY

These opening songs illustrate very early on, the compelling quality of Louise Dodds’ songwriting and vocal performance, together with the finely etched musical arrangements, that are to be discovered on this album.

Educating the Heart, at the midpoint in the album, is a song that provides a platform for one of the best vocals on the album. The elegantly paced phrasing and the way Louise Dodds’ voice soars to convey in the most authentic of ways, the search for knowing oneself and openness, is breathtaking. A special mention here for the instrumental break, featuring a drum pattern by Dave Hamblett that is magically nuanced and quite hypnotic.

Holyrood is a warm homage to Louise Dodds’ hometown of Edinburgh, and musically has a pacy tempo, with Elchin Shirinov playing one of the best piano solos on the album, full of inventive phrases that completely hold the listeners attention.

A JAZZ CLASSIC

Lifeline, the song that follows, is one of the absolutely standout tracks on the album. The vocal, music, and playing, make for a jazz classic. The vocal effortlessly conveys the emotional journey towards finding an authentic sense of self in life and relationships. The lyrics are brilliantly put together, as this extract from the song illustrates:

“Call up the coastguard

Tell her I’m lost and all at sea

Or write me a postcard

Made out to who I used to be

‘Cause I need to bring her back to life”

The instrumental break includes a quite wonderous double bass solo by Max Luthert, shooting out a myriad of reverberating tones and musical accents.

Concluding the album are Dark Night Of The Soul and Wiser. Both songs fit thematically well together as the album’s coda, drawing out the pathway that flows from learning from life’s struggles to embracing the liberation of personal change. They have an irrepressible forward motion musically, with Wiser having an appealing tinge of funk and soul, which is sure to be very uplifting in live performance.

A BEST ALBUM OF 2025

This album, which has been supported by Creative Scotland, will be sure to figure very high up in this reviewer’s best albums of 2025. The outstanding vocal performances and songwriting in evidence here, make this a very special album indeed. Add in the splendid musical arrangements and sensational playing across piano, drums and double bass, and this is an album that needs to be heard widely.

A final word on the album’s lyrical themes. These capture empathically, emotions, feelings and the path towards personal change, that is quite moving and very impactful. A real strength of this superb album.

You can view the official video for As Standard here: