'The Red Album' is the latest release from the female Americana/country/roots trio Red Molly.
The band has been together for ten years now, and comprises Laurie MacAllister on bass, Abbie Gardner on dobro, and Molly Ventner on guitar, with all vocal duties being shared. This album follows on from 2011's 'Light In The Sky', and is an excellent collection of thirteen songs.
Opening with 'Clinch River Blues', which comes across less as a blues song, and more as a field holler, full of stomps and claps punctuating the music, and with a hook line of “Down to the river I go” this is a great start to the album, and shows how well Abbie and Molly's harmonies support Laurie's smooth lead vocal.
The majority of the songs on the album are self-penned. However, the girls manage to throw in a couple of really cool cover versions. Their cover of Simon & Garfunkel's 'Homeward Bound' is a delight. Initially, when I saw this on the CD, I was a little bit sceptical, after all, who can improve on Paul Simon's classic written way back in 1966 at Widnes Railway Station in Cheshire, and appearing on the album 'Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Thyme'? With this, the girls manage to pull off a version which can hold its head up high in comparison with the original.
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'You Don't Have the Heart for It' is a track that gets the girls' country skills to the fore, being a country tearjerker with some nice pedal steel guitar thrown in courtesy of Adam Ollendorff, who manages to make the tune sound lively, whilst the lyrical subject matter is somewhat more sorrowful: - "You don't have the heart for it. Of this I'm sure/If you ever loved me, you don't anymore/It's not like you're mean to me, your intentions are pure/You don't have the heart for it, anymore”.
Overall, this is a likeable album, which manages to offer quite a bit more than others mining the same genre. Certainly worth a listen.
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