In RILO KILEY (Jenny Lewis's other band) it seems her talent has suffered the standard band problem of everyone wanting to play all the time, on everything. This album, released on Rough Trade in the UK, cuts right away and gloriously celebrates voices and songs. Lewis can sing effortlessly well while Chandra and Leigh Watson provide virtuoso country-gospel vocal support that transforms the whole album into something special. The songs stand up very well and a minimal accompaniment keeps the attention on Jenny Lewis's fine singing.
The point is made very firmly in track one: "Run Devil Run". There are two bars of hesitant finger picking on a guitar, a nice big gap to draw breath. And then a miserly one minute of evocative hard-edged a capella singing. It could easily have come from the soundtrack of a Coen Brothers film about a women's prison farm in rural Kentucky.
"The Big Guns" uses two guitars, with some foot stamping kick drum and bass to bowl the three pure voices on their way. "Rise Up With Fists!!!" multiplies the stakes melodically and lyrically. By now I'm getting those goose bumps that switch off the brain part and let the music come straight into the guts. Critical discrimination is now discarded and I'm loving it. A slightly sniffy review from Pitchfork starts to look like the vegetarian footnote in a pie shop.
So when she starts off singing "I'd rather be lonely" in "Happy" I'm really not going to check the poetic integrity of those lyrics too closely. She's singing to me, dammit, and it sounds mighty interesting. I get an image of her doing this one on a low stage in a gloomy bar in a film with Tom Waits muttering surrealistic anecdotes in the background. The Twins stand down for "Happy" – the title is a little sardonic.
They're back on a bit of a filler: "The Charging Sky" which has to enrol a verse of slide guitar to get interesting , but which still has s neat chorus and the line "twenty five years of spreading infection" that nearly stops everything dead.
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"Melt Your Heart" does just that. It’s a sotto voce soul ballad, with those Twins doing a delicate glide through a stream of emotional tenderness.
"You Are What You Love" is a bit of a pause in the proceedings while we wait for the big number: "Rabbit Fur Coat"
Apparently the first song she wrote for the album, it's a great tumble of overdramatic bad behaviour in Woodie Guthrie's spontaneous-sounding narrative style and guitar playing. It's a real folk song that you just have to join in with at the end of each verse. Again, the Twins stand back and let her at it – voice, finger-style guitar and rabbit fur coat only. And the knife against the throat. And the cocaine habit.
That could be it. But we then get a burst of Tom Petty twelve string … oh bloody marvellous! It's The Travelling Wilburys impersonated by Connor Oberst, Ben Gibbard and M. Mard (fabulous voice) and "Handle with Care" is a fine old tune and this is great fun as a not-too-reverential nod towards the ghost of the mighty Roy Orbison.
We also get a bit, but not very, religious ("Born Secular") in a Renee Descartes sort of "might as well just in case" kind of a way. With a silly drum machine and some lovely chapel moments, it's a song that does for liturgy what "1066 And All That" does for history - shows it's love by getting it sooo just wrong.
So if you're in the mood for a bit of indie gospel soul alt-country with good singing, I think this could be your album of choice. I loves it from the first play and could well overdo it and spoil things.
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