- Label: 'Last Gang Records'
- Genre: 'Alt/Country'
- Release Date: '11th February 2013'
Our Rating:
Lindi Ortega is a sassy young Canadian with big curly country hair and little red boots who belts out her songs like a pint-sized Dolly Parton.
"Look out California, I'm coming for my lover's heart tonight" she sings on the title track. Taking a Greyhound bus to meet her man could be considered as a promise or a threat.
This is just one of the tongue-in-cheek road ballads that take our heroine from highway to hotel room leaving us to speculate how much is autobiographical and how much is poetic license.
The song is followed briskly by The Day You Die where the humour is more explicit. Co-written with Bruce Wallace, it catalogues the things people do to keep love alive and forces her to wonder out loud: "why does it got to be so damn hard for me".
Ortega recently moved to Nashville to get closer to her inspirations; Johnny Cash being near the top of this list.
She is all too conscious of her status as an outsider and makes no claims to be playing country music strictly by the rules.
In speaking of her struggle to find her musical voice, she quotes from Albert Camus' Myth of Sysyphus; from her videos and promo shots it's clear that she's not shy of flaunting her feminine charms to make an impression.
She's not one to be worried about political correctness either. In Use Me, she offers herself to her man as a natural alternative to drugs ( "I'll get you high in all the right ways" ) and on the song High, she doesn't think twice about promoting non prescription pills to medicate her pain.
This devil may care attitude is summed up in the self explanatory Demons Don't Get Me Down.
The twin concerns of sin and redemption rear their heads on Murder of Crows and Heaven Has No Vacancy. In the first she blithely confesses to homicide, while in the second she finds herself on the wrong side of the pearly gates.
This is a raunchy and feisty set of songs that plays fast and loose with traditional country and western sources but boldly carries this off with energy to spare.
