She's no stranger to either tradition or controversy is FARRELL SPENCE. The daughter of a celebrated Winnipeg folk singer mother and gambling, grifting father, her first romantic entanglement was with a bank robber and the ghosts of her past flit around her and help colour in the stark and always autobiographical songs peopling her debut album, 'A Town Called Hell'.
Songs of sadness and experience, of course, can rarely be beaten if they are done well, and believe me, Farrell Spence is very much at home in this enigmatic, melancholy-soused landscape. Yes, both her emotive delivery and the haunting sparseness of most of the songs will inevitably recall her Canadian countryfolk such as The Cowboy Junkies, but Farrell is very much her own woman and these songs resonate beautifully within their own time and space.
With its' lyrical imagery of “jumping on a boxcar and never looking back”, the album's title song leads off, opening and closing with the sound of a lonesome train. It's a classic drifter's anthem of being stuck in a no-horse town and regretting the chances you've missed and therefore wholly convincing from the off. The sparseness and space in the arrangement is immediately apparent and while a band do make their ghostly presence felt in a few strategic places, it's always Spence's keening guitar and smokily effective vocals that take centre stage and effortlessly cast their spells.
A slew of hard-bitten delights follow in the title track's wake. Songs like 'Tell It To Someone Else' and 'A Murder Of Crows' seem bleak on the surface, but there's always a little warmth to be found, whether it's in the subtlety of the cello that features in the end coda of the former or the sultry horn that rides shotgun on the high lonesome latter. Country and folk-blues are broadly the bedrock, but the brooding presence of songs such as 'Killing Time' and 'Boys Like You & Girls Like Me' (which is thrown into sharp relief by the ironic blast of 'You Are My Sunshine' it segues into) have as much in common with the wracked likes of the Red House Painters as more traditional touchstones as Emmy Lou Harris and are all the better for it.
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Besides, Spence clearly has an ear for covers to accompany her original songs. Her re-invention of Mary Gauthier's already heartbroken 'I Drink' (“fish swim, birds fly/ Daddies yell, Mommas cry”) takes the song to another level entirely, while her opiated, dreamlike and stricken version of Bukka White's 'High Fever Blues' is one of the major highlights of the album's second half. Indeed it's a testament to Farrell's songwriting skills that she can follow it up and bring the album to a climax with 'Here's To You & Me': an enormously poignant due with a gravelly tearful Rob Bracken from Vancouver band Brickhouse. It's one of those songs that's riven by painful emotion yet somehow sounds life-affirming at the same time and is just about the perfect way for this album stuffed with spectral beauty to wind down.
'A Town Called Hell', then, may well be off the tourist map and anything but the kind of place the average tourist may want to hang around. The discerning, though, could easily discover an apparently innocent first stay in the local seedy motel becoming an important annual event.
(www.myspace.com/farrellspence)
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