ALBUM REVIEW: Hannah Rose Platt – ‘Fragile Creatures’

There’s a lot to be said for an artist who starts out well and only keeps their trajectory firm and upward from there. Hannah Rose Platt, for instance, started out with solid country-folk on 2015’s Portraits, standing out most through the evocative lyricism that such a style often lives and dies on. From there, around the time of her signing to Xtra Mile, a notable expansion to her repertoire found 2023’s pairing of Deathbed Confessions and Hypnogogia to have such a different feel. Their style of folk was a good way off the normal Xtra Mile roster, at times almost dipping into pastures of dark-folk akin to Emma Ruth Rundle and her ilk. Most of all, it’s the most ear-catching that Platt has ever sounded, and arguably the most creatively fulfilled, too.

To merely call them ’stepping stones’ to Fragile Creatures probably diminishes them too much, but it’s also not difficult to see the logic. It’s Platt’s most varied album from a sonic standpoint, as well as the conceptual thoughtfulness that’s always wonderful to see in singer-songwriters who’ve earned the right to stretch their legs like this. Fragile Creatures simply couldn’t have been a debut; there’s too of an onus on experience being woven in. So, when Platt has that experience, it’s another step on her continued journey higher. For those who like their folk soaked in compelling, literate ingenuity, Fragile Creatures is it.

Thus, the caveat needs to be laid down that, if you’re outside that demographic, this is not an easy sell, by any means. The basic pitch alone should weed out the uncertains—an album centred around the historical medical treatment of women, with many of its ideas built from various true vignettes and pieces of literature. If your folk tipple of choice is the kind with stomps, claps and individuals dressed as farmers and / or stable-hands, you’re out of luck. Granted, why you’d want to cater to that crowd is a mystery in the first place. Platt sure doesn’t, and she’s far, far better for it. For one, there’s actual cleverness in the idea to be found, in songs like Curious Mixtures and The Sick Rose that shine on vocabulary alone. It goes without saying that Platt has songwriting prowess, inevitably a carryover from her country-ish days that help on songs with a more defined story to tell, like The Yellow Wallpaper or Rest In Persistence (An Anthem For Anne Greene).

There’s also some refreshing vocal variety, or at least, in how Platt’s voice is presented. Often, she’s not too distinct—soft and waifish, and when atop some pillowy pianos on Radiant, having the tone of a musical cast member or the singer of a classic Disney song. That in itself is all pretty good when Platt sells it as well as she does. But whereas plenty of folkstresses wouldn’t even touch that dial, Fragile Creatures’ variety comes out once again. And it isn’t ‘experimental’, per se. What it is, however, is a really good method of cultivating growth from the sound. There’s the bold, blurred-over feel of a Spector-produced girl group on Young Men Need Their Wives, while the album closer Epilogue – The Wandering Womb Ballet is the closest that Platt comes to an outright character, coquettishly dancing across the spare, twinkly guitar.

Notably, there’s a very feminine nature to Fragile Creatures, by design and used to its advantage. After all, there’s a woman’s story at the centre of every one of these songs, and a protagonist that’s often being done over by a male-centric view on health that, historically, has been far from kind or fair. On an album titled Fragile Creatures, there’s obvious scorn and snark below its often-prim exterior. Still, in what’s very definitively proven to be this album’s norm, Platt is a dab hand at spinning that on its head. It’s what turns Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper into an industrial groan, or the story of the Edinburgh Seven—the first matriculated female students at a British university and key figures in women’s allowance to become doctors—into a dusty, western murder-ballad. There’s clear vulnerability present, too, like on Magdalene and Radiant to serve as their exhaling counterpoints amid the weight of centuries of mistreatment.

Critically, though, Fragile Creatures isn’t an album that’s driven down by that weight. It’s still an enjoyable listen, especially with peritextual knowledge that makes following its multitude of threads that much more gratifying. It’s also just very skillfully put together as a folk album, avoiding the dryness and rigidity that’s often such a pox on this sort of music. (Ed Harcourt contributes a duck call to Radiant, and that tidbit alone could crater plenty of albums like this as far as personality goes.) Put all that together, and Fragile Creatures definitely feels like a new creative milestone for Platt. Alone, it holds plenty of superlatives—her most adventurous album; the most interesting her writing has been; and just the straight-ahead best thing she’s done to date.

For fans of: Laura Marling, Emma Ruth Rundle, Nick Cave

‘Fragile Creatures’ by Hannah Rose Platt is released on 25th April on Xtra Mile Recordings.

Words by Luke Nuttall