“Is this Duffy?” Diane asked yesterday, not long after I’d pressed play on Ripple on the Wing. We were making dinner in the kitchen, where we keep a decade-old Bose speaker in a drawer 99 percent of the time, including this one, so the music seeped from my phone’s tiny speaker as if from a transistor radio. The old-school soul sound found on Melbourne-based Ella Thompson’s sophomore set is sure to appeal to fans of such throwback acts as Thee Sacred Souls, Durand Jones & the Indications, the Stone Foundation, and the aforementioned Welch soulstress, whose classic debut still gets much play in this household.
Ripple on the Wing simmers and shimmers from start to finish, with Thompson’s soulful vocals accented by horns, taut rhythms and feathery-soft backing vocals. It’s more the smooth soul of the Chi-Lites and Main Ingredient than the tougher Memphis and Muscle Shoals variants, though some of the latter does work its way to the fore from time to time. It opens with “Let There Be Nothing,” which turned my head a while back, takes “One More Step” with the second track and puts all the pieces together (again) on “Jigsaw.” “There’s a Fire, Yet to Burn” delves into the disconnects that sometimes develop in life.
“Omen” plunges a stake into the Damians of the world, while “Other People’s Problems” slows things down—and flows like a long-lost staple on the R&B radio of my youth. “Little Star,” for its part, contemplates our place in the world. “Changes” is another infectious delight. “Sleep Walking” treads softly into metaphor, while “Don’t Be a Taurus” finds Thompson encouraging herself—and a potential partner—to give love another shot: “Disillusioned adult swimming in a fish bowl/jump start my heart.”
She and her former Dorsal Fins bandmate Liam McGorry wrote the songs and co-produced them with engineer Henry Jenkins. She sings lead, of course, and also contributes the backing vocals alongside Jace XL. Also on hand: Surprise Chef’s Jethro Curtin (keyboards), Lachlan Stuckey (guitars) and Hudson Whitlock (percussion), Cheryl Durongpisitkul (sax and flute), Tom Petit (bass) and Alexandra Roper (drums). McGorry also plays trumpet.
One reason why the soulful treatises of the late 1960s and early ‘70s still resonate in today’s world is that they offer a momentary escape from the madness that exists just beyond our front door. Ripple on the Wing is a tremendous bag o’ songs that does the same.
The Old Grey Cat 
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