TERI FALINI is not your typical punk-pop priestess. Her life story prior to this new musical career was unconventional by the every nature of its conventionality. TERI graduated from Harvard, married, produced two beautiful daughters, had a successful career and a nice home in San Francisco. In other words TERI was a card carrying, fully paid-up member of the American Dream.
But then her husband decided to try the merchandise he was selling as part of his job working for a pharmaceuticals firm, over time losing the plot completely and eventually “disappear[ing] into a haze of street drugs”. Traumatic to say the least but TERI recovered and rediscovered a new self through music.
But does this reinvention work? Does her music convince? Is TERI replacing the role of the middle-class WASP with that of the rebellious rock ‘n’ roller, ultimately failing to inhabit the body of either because she’s not ‘4 Real’?
Well, first things first. She looks the part, particularly on the CD’s back cover photograph as she stands legs apart with a low-slung guitar, short skirt, tight T and knee-length white patent leather boots with the kind of heels Dave Hill would die for: a cross between two Kims, Deal and Gordon with a touch of Sheryl Crow. The music of the Kim’s also looms large across the whole album as does PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Courtney Love and even the likes of Stevie Nicks and Grace Slick.
So large in fact that TERI never escapes any of them despite the promise of her own song-writing talent. That said, she does write the very best of the types of songs in which these women excel and as a result makes the whole enterprise worthy and entertaining if hardly ground-breaking.
The band around her are also primed and oiled for this kind of melodic punk/rock if at times subdued by a safe production sound that whilst not bland never really gets rough and dirty enough to match TERI’s outpourings.
Where she has an edge, unsurprisingly, is in the lyrical self-exploration and self-assessment of her unexpected changes in life and fortune. She runs a pretty full gamut of emotions from outright anger, “They wrote her out and they replaced her with / An awful stepmother a horrible witch / A perfect virgin and a fucking bitch” (‘Cinderella’) through pithy humour “You hoped you prayed / That you’d be taken away / With a glass of Chardonnay” (‘The Good Life’) and painful pity, presumably towards her ex, “He’s a broken man / Snaps my heart again / Can’t shake off of him / His sins” on the poignant acoustic of ‘Broken Man’.
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Thus ‘Sun Under Me’ achieves some form of identity in the myriad of very strong female personalities that have informed its sound. TERI absorbs her influences well, mirroring the potent magic they posses without ever stepping out of their shadow nor, to be fair, becoming totally subsumed by their ever-presence. The turmoil of her dramatic life experiences means she has an empathic understanding of their root attractions, from the animalistic and carnal to the ballsy and belligerent.
Whether or not she can truly break out and carve a niche of her own will probably be determined as much by her ability to stretch herself beyond the musical heritage she lovingly pilfers as by her willingness to direct her lyrical attention to issues other than her dramatic change in circumstances.
It would be a shame if her identity were whittled down to the easy-to-digest fact that – like some bad TV movie script - she went from Middle-class Mom to Rock Chick.
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