Tamara: Album Review
“Music has long been an outlet for emotional pain, self examination or working-stuff-out and in Oxford at least Tamara Parsons-Baker has few equals at doing all those in song form. ‘Pain Is Just Pain’ is her debut solo album, the follow-up to 2019’s superb ‘The Girl With the Secret Fire’ with her band Death of the Maiden, and a record written before and during lockdown and financed by a successful crowdfunder campaign. Across eleven songs, just her voice and acoustic guitar, she delves fully into absence, loss, abandonment, memory, longing and identity, but while it is a musically solemn affair it’s as beautiful as it is bleak.”