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Däsha Ray : Heart's Desire (USA,2001)
Instrumentally "Hearts Desire" contains nice flowing (electric piano guitar based) melodies. But the soft fragile soul texts come in in such a straight way as if singing popular tunes, thus loosing some of its instrumental intimacy. The voice of Bradford would be nice for a rock band, but is unusual for this kind of instrumentation. This has been put into balance with some more synthetic sounding drum, and nice sounding native flute. The drum makes it sound more mainstream in combination with the songs, where the flute makes it more spiritual. The instrumental tracks with added flute are a bit into New Age territory, but these tracks I prefer there. It is as if the singing and instrumentation are sometimes still a little bit to far away from each other and might need a few details more to make it into a better balance towards its listenable enjoyment. I wish the more simple expressions of its textual part were more into the background (with choirs or something) because the music could have spoken completely for itself too. I prefered the song "Can we forgive" with some Native influence.
In general the CD might be just OK for listeners open to inner growth from a New Age point of view. You can listen yourself to tracks at their website.
For a more into depth review of the singer-songwriting part, I asked the more specialized Lawrence Woolfe to do this for me. Here's his review :
"Dasha Ray are Bradford Sith and Tim Mead. Heart's desire, recorded at Smith-Mead studio's is a cliché hidden musically uninspired new age styled cd. I'm afraid that everything about this cd spells mediocrity. The melody lines for the songs are simple and ordinary, whilst the sentiments offered in the epics are full of overearnest greating card expressions redolent of writers with nothing to express but obvious bleatings and endearments. The spoken word introduction to "beyond the moon" is delivered with the tone of someone with something serious to say, but articulating nothing but headed self-expression. How on earth can "looking into a world that cannot be seen, expanding into unknown thoughts illuminate us to a brighter vision" ? I suspect the choice of objectives did not strike from a deep poetic struggle for clarity of meaning. What is being expressed throughout a simple certainty, gushing feeling and unrealistic childlike spiritual yearnings.. The recordings are of a good standard, the instrumentation used native American flute, acc. & el. Guitars,keyboards etc. is what you would expect with no surprises, just pleasant meandering ersatz noodlings. In short I've wasted enough of my time on a cd that has nothing to recommend it."
