“I really feel this record was a big challenge, in the concept, in how we wanted it to sound and, last but not least, vocally,” Monica Queen states on a dull Glasgow afternoon while we’re sitting in a West End café. Monica - ex-voice of Thrum, guest vocalist on Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’ and on James Grant’s more recent works - has just released her new solo album, follow-up to “Ten Sorrowful Mysteries” (Creeping Bent, 2002).

Co-written and produced by ex-Thrum guitarist Johnny Smillie, “Return of the Sacred Heart” (Vertical Records) extends the main religious themes of her first album and gives Queen’s vocal skills a new dimension. “Johnny came up with songs that were extremely far-reaching in the key they were written,” Monica recounts, “we felt that with this album we wanted to capture an emotive and melancholic atmosphere and for us that only comes if the voice really tries to reach out and grab something.” The new album turned into a bit of a surprise for both Monica and Johnny, “The record seemed to take a life of its own,” she remembers, “and we found it difficult at times to keep up with it: everyday we knew that in the little studio in our home there was something special going to happen when everything was switched on.”

“Return of the Sacred Heart” opens with the soulful ‘Fly Away’, featuring Jim White, who, a while back, asked Queen and Smillie to work with him on a track for his new record, a track that Johnny defines as “long, dark and avant-garde”. White returned the favour with ‘Fly Away’: “Jim is a wonderful character,” Monica states, “once you get in his company after a few times, he begins to relax and you begin to relax and to talk as well. He’s a very smart and intelligent fellow and you tend not to say very much or too much before you get to know him because you don’t want to make a fool of yourself. It was a pleasure to be able to work with him.”

All the songs on “Return of the Sacred Heart” deserve and demand the listener’s attention: ‘The Passion’ is a hieratical experience with an ethereal background chorus; the title track is heartbreaking; ‘Holiest Night’ is a poetic track; ‘Déjà Vu’ is tinged with nostalgia. Throughout the record the music arrangements are sparse: most songs feature an acoustic guitar, giving in this way more space to Queen’s angelic voice, a mixture of grace, fragility and purity. “We spent time developing this style, where the guitar weaves around the vocals,“ Johnny explains, “we essentially create instrumentals, indeed we consider the vocals as just another instrument. There could almost be no lyrics in our works, because essentially our songs are instrumentals, we are influenced by instrumentals, by classical music for example.”

It took quite a while to this extraordinary musical duo to release the new album, but the long break between the two works wasn’t actually planned: Monica and Johnny had started working on it as soon as “Ten Sorrowful Mysteries” had been released. One of the reasons of the delayed release is their recent move to another record label, “We really had a wonderful time with Creeping Bent,” Monica recounts, “Douglas McIntyre did an absolutely fantastic job promoting the record and giving it to people that he thought would understand it: without Douglas probably there wouldn’t have been any ‘Ten Sorrowful Mysteries’, so we will be eternally grateful to him. He felt that Creeping Bent, though, might have not benefited us and he thought we should have moved to a label where we would have had more financial backing. We really didn’t want to leave Creeping Bent, but then Vertical Records were quite happy to put the record out in conjunction with Sanctuary and it seemed the right thing to do.”

Both Monica and Johnny feel happy about their new work and about their music, “’Ten Sorrowful Mysteries’ was received very well, some reviewers thought it was a masterpiece and we certainly wouldn’t disagree with that,” Johnny says, “we feel that with this new album we have found our own sound, something unique to us, and we want to keep it.” “’Ten Sorrowful Mysteries’ and ‘Return of the Sacred Heart’ have the same elements between them,” Monica continues, “and if we felt that we were to make a more straight ahead guitar rock record, something a little more upbeat, we would go ahead and do it, but we would certainly retain what we’ve learnt from these two albums.

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