I’ve hardly been able to keep up with the sheer wealth of great Canadian Roots music flung at me over the past few years. From Vancouver to Nova Scotia, promising artists have been flying out of the woodwork and while the likes of Farrell Spence, Kevin House, Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir and Blackie & The Rodeo Kings (to name but a few) are hardly household names outside the Maple State, they have all been bequeathing us startling, Roots-infused music in recent times.
Hailing from Alberta, Jolene Higgins is yet another name to squeeze under the broad Americana umbrella. However, like the random sample of aforementioned names, she’s anything but another Gram or Emmy Lou clone. Indeed, if her fourth studio album ‘Across The Plains’ is anything to go by, she’s considerably broader in her stylistic reach than most, not to mention way more irreverent and extremely sassy to boot.
Admittedly, an album recorded in a venue which was previously a Polish Seniors Centre and an Aboriginal United Church may conjure unusual vibes, but it seems the Roots-y melting pot Jolene (aka LITTLE MISS HIGGINS) dragged into Winnipeg’s Bedside Studio was especially spicy to begin with. There’s intelligence, mischief, risk-taking and cool song-writing going down here in roughly equal dollops and it all makes for something very special indeed.
Opener ‘Beautiful Sun’ serves notice that this is going to be something very different. A life-affirming Folk-blues with brushed drums, saucy vocals and trumpets sounding like they could be sampled from a Bix Beiderbecke 78, it sounds like it was beamed in from another world.
The rest of the album then basically saunters away in its’ own sweet direction. Songs like ‘The Tornado Song’ and ‘Wash These Blues Away’ have a jazzy, almost Vaudevillian vibe, referencing everything from Memphis Minnie to (in the latter’s case) The Kinks’ ‘Muswell Hillbillies’, while the light-hearted, charity-shop raiding ‘Bargain Shop Panties’ even gets away with, er, double bass and drum solos.
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Elsewhere, ‘Hope You Don’t Feel Blue’ is about the most modern-sounding thing here, driven along by Delta-fied guitars and a splendidly gutsy vocal. The gentle ‘My Love’ is its’ antithesis: a lovely, down-home love song built around just two guitars which sounds sentimental but never cloys. ‘Gather My Fruit’, meanwhile, does away with the instruments altogether, bringing us back to the land with just stomping feet, clapping hands and feisty vocals. It sounds hugely suggestive, but apparently it really is about a plum tree and fermenting wine. Oh well.
There’s the odd less than crucial moment. ‘Glad Your Whiskey Fits Inside My Purse’ is good flirtatious fun, if less than essential, while the closing killing floor blues ‘Slaughterhouse (Revisited)’ instils an air of menace, but rambles on for the best part of ten minutes. However, neither can prevent ‘Across the Plains’ from establishing Little Miss Higgins as yet another capable Canadian contender we need to keep our ears open for.
Little Miss Higgins online
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