Gabrielle Aplin

Please Don't Say You Love Me

19 year old Bath singer Gabrielle Aplin rose to fame for her You Tube videos, where she covered hits by Paramore and You Me At Six. Now signed to Parlophone, Please Don’t Say You Love Me is her debut single. She has a diploma in popular music – whatever that means – but she is self-taught on piano, having grown up listening to Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen.

All sounds good so far, but there has been such a flurry of female vocalists in the last few years that you wonder just how many more You Tube or the X Factor can uncover. Pleasant enough, the single is a tale of love, uncertainty and heartbreak and the chorus refrain of “please don’t say you love me, coz I might not to say it back” will certainly hit home for all the teenage girls that is aimed at.

There is a stripped down version that sounds more like the type of material Birdy or Slow Moving Millie have produced over the last year and shows off Aplin’s impressive but generic vocal. The debut album will be the test of whether there is more to this young singer or whether she is just another Eliza Doolittle.