Emerging New Jersey label Headshop Records recently brought us the high-octane excitement of the tremendous 'Garage Mayhem: Live At Asbury Lanes' compilation. That record found the retro thrills and spills coming thick and fast and made it abundantly clear that producer John Noll and engineer Adam Vaccarelli knew a thing or three about corralling the finest garage punk and power pop sounds seeping from their area.
It turns out that Noll and Vaccarelli are again actively involved in both the production (Noll) and musical execution (Vaccarelli, who plays bass) of the next Headshop release, though it's a musical animal of a very different stripe altogether. This time the release in question is the mighty fine 'Rusty Water' by JANEY TODD: a record which takes Americana as its' base form but gleefully twists it into some very attractive individualistic shapes indeed.
I'm fairly clueless as to Todd's pedigree, but her close-miked and charismatic vocals have more than a touch of the Southern states about them and her songs are riven with both graphic (and sometimes horrific) personal experience and/ or expert narrative but often leavened with humour and rapier wit. Vocally, she will probably attract her (un)fair share of the inevitable Lucinda/ Emmy Lou comparisons, but she's very much her own girl too and in places her tough and tender vocals (for example on songs like 'How Much?' or the saucy 'Snakeskin Boots') recall the likes of Chriss Hynde every bit as much as any of the stetson-toting brigade.
Ally this talent with a versatile and sympathetic band featuring drummer Tom Bruno, bassist Vaccarelli, lead guitarist Dave Rosen and a further clutch of talented chums such as Kevin Kavanaugh (keyboards) and Jon Francis on violin and dulcimer and you have the makings of something very potent indeed. And so it proves, for 'Rusty Water' is one of those growers which just gets better and better with repeated listens.
Pacing-wise, it's a strange beast. Most bands usually hit you with something immediate to claw you in as rapidly as possible, but not Todd and co. 'Rusty Water' opens with one of its' most enigmatic tracks, the funereal and mistily atmospheric 'The Man Downstairs' where French accordion, slow and deliberate twangly guitars and Todd's close-miked and very live vocals vy for attention. Lyrically, it's seedy and memorable ("rent boys and drummers scam on me at will/ will they, won't they, will I won't I...you never can tell") and in atmosphere it eerily recalls the drifting melancholy Daniel Lanois wrung from (ironically) Emmy Lou Harris's 'Wrecking Ball' album.
It's a great track, though by no means representative of much of what follows in its' wake. The ensuing 'Serpentine' has a humdinger of a kooky chorus and finds a pop sensibility determinedly raising its' head, though the gritty 'How Much?' supplies both the album title and an intriguing Dylan-ish wordscape ("hotel restaurant, wine glasses, dead father/ drunken auto mechanic bringin' rusty water") which will fascinate indefinitely.
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The two most overtly country-flecked tracks provide two of the record's finest achievements in 'Mighta Coulda Had' and the marvellous 'Alcatraz'. The former is a potent update of Johnny Cash's often-imitated railroad rhythm but with parpy harmonica and baritone guitar egging Janey into a great hayseed dixie vocal, while 'Alcatraz' is arguably this writer's favourite tune here. OK, I agree that on paper a song about the vicissitudes of life in prison should be anything but funny, but Todd's lyrics are so wonderfully vivid and OTT ("you can't hold me, I dug out with a Tampax applicator/ I swam through swamps of sewerage and hot blood alligators") and when you tie this to a chorus so stupidly catchy it imprints itself on your brain within seconds... well you really can't go wrong.
Elsewhere, they give even a certain Mr. Cave a run for his demonic money on the Biblical epic 'Bones' , where the lyrics ("you bite off the head, blood squirts from the neck/ you gouge out the eyeballs, the maggots make a nest") could be a little too 'Dawn Of The Dead' were they not allied to a potent diablo-infused skank which torches genres with glee. Most curious of all, though, is the decision to sequence the record's three muscular bar-room rockers consecutively at the end. Not that I'm complaining too loudly, mind, as the sexy, blue-collar characterisation of 'Snakeskin Boots' rumbles along on fork-tongued slide guitar and Ian McLagan-style piano, 'Whistle Dixie' features the honey of all catty put-downs ("you're annoying us with your celibacy/ you oughta get back to the shameless slut you used to be") and the closing 'Everybody's Right' is the pumped-up anthem they had in reserve all along.
'Rusty Water', then, flows through a strange, but wholly engaging landscape which takes Americana as its' starting point but never wavers in plotting its' own individualistic course. This writer, for one, hopes it's merely the start of a journey without maps we'll be able to take with Janey Todd in the future.
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