Martha Wainwright: Come Home to Mama – review

Martha Wainwright has never shied away from writing songs about the people closest to her. But it's one thing to reflect on adolescent tiffs with your parents, or berate errant lovers; another to address the early death of your mother and the effects on marriage or childbirth. Wainwright's vocals might be dressy but her thoughts are naked, heartbreakingly so on All Your Clothes, a graveside conversation with Kate McGarrigle. Her faithful cover of Proserpina, one of the last songs McGarrigle wrote, is even more acute, an anguished wail of longing set to plangent piano and violin. Nothing matches it for emotional impact, although Four Black Sheep and Leave Behind are absorbing in their glassy contemplation of death. The life-after-birth songs are brighter, with a cheekiness in the lyrics to I Am Sorry and Can You Believe It; it's only on Everything Wrong that Wainwright gets everything wrong, by plunging into sentimentality.