It's an old cliche to say certain people were 'born' to do something, but it's often true. Let's face it - even leaving aside 'Spinal Tap'-style jokes about working in chapeau shops - can you really envisage Keith Richards or Lemmy doing anything other than being the notorious perma-presences they have been on the scarred surface of rock for the past forty years plus?
Rhetorical question, of course, but in the case of other talented performers, it takes a circuitous route for them to realise that music was their calling all along. Take AMY SPEACE for example: after a rural Baltimore and Minnesota upbringing, young Amy was sure acting was her vocation, going as far as upping sticks to New York city and winning spots off-broadway and in a much-lauded National Shakespeare Company production of 'Henry V' , even going as far as running her own theatre company in Manhattan's East Village.
So, from such a background, you might imagine Speace would have gone on to rub shoulders with Barbra Streisand rather than us lower-life, but irresistible Alt. Rock/ Americana types, but it was at about this time that Amy spent a fateful $50 on a pawn shop guitar and began to set her poetry to music. Fast forward several years, a lot of craft-learning and teeth-cutting as half of female acoustic duo Edith O later and finally the fully-fledged roots-influenced Amy Speace emerges with her trusty henchmen and debut album 'Songs From Bright Street': a record that the smart money suggests will be seen as one of the best Americana-related debuts of the year.
And, after significant exposure, your reviewer can only concur, for 'Songs For Bright Street' is an excellent record, full of grittily honest, moving vignettes interspersed with both dashes of infectious humour and a couple of heartbreaking acoustic confessionals. Her band, The Tearjerks, are also crucial to the plot, playing with an innate restraint that gives Speace's emotive voice plenty of room but also ensuring any necessary spaces are filled along the way.
Although broadly a roots/ country album, 'Songs For Bright Street' is a versatile record drawing upon pop, folk and rock'n'roll as it sees fit. Opener 'Step Out Of The Shade' is immediately likeable, with an easy, determined chorus and the band setling into a laid-back groove around Jagoda's funky drumming. This inherent funkiness is explored even further on the feisty 'Not The Heartless Kind' where Speace sends a warning shot across the bow of any would-be cheatin' Charlie when she sings "I built this house with my own hand/ I can tear it down, crush these bricks into sand" and James Mastro's slide guitar calls up Duane Allman. Both of these are great, while on the suggestive, straight-up roots-rock of 'The Real Thing' ("you can look to the princess in her high glass tower/ or join us witches, we keep very late hours") they set up a wonderfully sassy rockabilly backdrop.
|
Elsewhere, though, they dip their buckets deep into the country well. With Cliff Eberhardt providing the male vocal foil, 'Row Row Row' takes in Appalachian-style country folk with its' mandolins, dobro and stand-up bass, while the whole band are right on the money on 'Right Through To Me': an affecting paean to the unexpected glory of love which boasts one of Speace's most charged vocals and a marvellously understated performance from all concerned, which only adds to the song's power. Slightly less positively, the album's most knockabout, throwaway moment is provided by the slightly goofy 'Double Wide Trailer', although there's no denying the sting in the lyrical tail in this story of dangerous redneck liaisons.
Ultimately, though, the record's real heart lies in the power of its' sparse ballads. 'Two' is an elegant, acoustic country-folk ballad featuring an emotional duet between Speace and The Jayhawks' Gary Louris and its' ultimately uplifting tale of love broken and mended is simply gorgeous. Ditto 'Make Me Lonely Again': a magnificent sad'n'blue affair with the band entering on tiptoe and taking the greatest care of the fragile package. If this isn't remarkable enough, it's followed up by an amazing cover of Blondie's 'Dreaming', with the former new wave classic given the full Patsy Cline treatment (two-step beat, golden sighs of pedal steel and Mastro's James Burton guitar runs) and sounding like it was always meant to be performed this way. In the dark horse stakes, it's a hot favourite and just possibly this reviewer's most-loved track despite extremely stiff competition.
'Songs For Bright Street', then, is a hugely impressive debut from an emerging talent who is sure to make very stealthy progress into a wider audience's heart during 2008. On balance, one can only pronounce that acting's loss is very much us music fans' unadulterated gain.
|
