Laura Cantrell's Kitty Wells tribute, William Elliott Whitmore, Amy LaVere

Laura Cantrell

“Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music”

Diesel Only

That must have been something in 1950s, hearing Kitty Wells sing about a fallen young woman pleading with a new boyfriend to forgive her tainted past.

“I don’t claim to be an angel/ My life’s been full of sin,” Wells sang in the1956 hit. “But, when I met you darling/ That all came to an end.”

This came at a time when women, including Wells, wore long-sleeved dresses buttoned up tight under their chin and never, ever, talked about s-e-x.

It seems quant to hear it now, sung completely unironically by the rightful heir to Wells, Laura Cantrell.



Laura Cantrell



Kitty Wells

Cantrell, who has one of the sweetest, most authentic voices in country music, has long had an affinity for Wells. But, the notion of a tribute album didn’t come up until 2009 when Cantrell was invited to celebrate Wells in a ceremony at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

The invitation prompted Cantrell to write the song “Kitty Wells Dresses,” which appears here, and to dig deep into Wells’ song catalog.

 Cantrell revives the songs straight up, drenching them in mournful fiddles and pedal steel. If it weren’t for her bright, clear voice and the sparking production, it could still be 1956.

Unjustly overlooked songs like “Poison In Your Heart,” “One By One,” “Amigo’s Guitar” and “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave,” get a new spin, along with more familiar songs like “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

William Elliott Whitmore

“Field Songs”

Anti- Records

William Elliott Whitmore confirms once again that music doesn’t have to be complicated to be good.

On his eight full-length album, the 33-year-old Iowa-born farmer strips the songs down to their souls, embellishing them with just enough fiddle, banjo, guitar and the occasional bird chirp to lift his raspy, working man’s voice.

William Elliott Whitmore

Whitmore is that howling, big-city busker pining for home, the gravel roads, the hard, honest work in the sun, the evenings on the wooden porch.

“I’m just here for a little while,” he reminds himself in “Everything Gets Gone.” “Like a tree by the river I’m holding on.”

In “Let’s Do Something Impossible,” he pleads with a long-time lover to trust him one last time.   

The album ends with its best song, the six-minute “Not Feeling Any Pain.” Over a thumping beat, Whitmore, the farmer and the human, surrenders himself to fate.

“The rain won’t fall/ The crops can’t grow/ The seeds will not take root,” he sings. “If you reap just what you sow/ Come harvest time we’ll see the proof.”

Amy LaVere

“Stranger Me”

Archer Records



Breaking up may be the best thing that ever happened to Amy LaVere, at least for her fans.

The feisty Louisiana belle follows up 2007’s “Anchors & Anvils” with a retooled sound and her most mature and swinging work yet.

With the help of producer Craig Silvey, who hipped up Arcade Fire, LaVere’s sound is broadened beyond her alt-country past with swooning horns, ringing guitars and a soulful Wurlitzer.



Amy LaVere



There are lots of songs here about women getting out of bad relationships in artistic ways.

“I’m stomping out of here/ I hope the rain comes pouring down through your roof,” she howls over a chorus of horns in “You Can’t Keep Me.”

In the swampy “Red Banks,” a jealous man tells his lover he’ll push her in the river if he sees her with another man. Instead, it’s the man who gets pushed in.

 “He made a hole in the river/ He didn’t make no sound,” LaVere sings.

Songs like “Damn Love Song,” “Lucky Boy” and “Tricky Heart” speak for themselves. The woozy cover of Captain Beefheart’s “Candle Mambo” shows just how far LaVere is willing to go to express her pain.

Review of new CDs from Gillian Welch, Dawes and The Rosebuds

 

 

Gillian Welch

“The Harrow and the Harvest”

Acony

O Sister, Where art thou?

That’s what Gillian Welch fans have been wondering for eight years, since the release of “Soul Journey,” a fine but relatively unsatisfying follow-up to her masterpiece, “Time (The Revelator).”

She hasn’t been getting hipper, that’s for sure. Welch’s new songs still sound like they’re tumbling from an arch-top wireless on the moonlit porch of an Appalachian mountain shack.

Teamed yet again with her live-in collaborator David Rawlings, the songs are spare, dark and crisply played. Besides the handclaps, harmonica and banjo on songs like “Six White Horses”  and “The Way it Will Be” there isn’t much adornment, nothing to distract from the seamless blending of the pair’s pure voices.

Buried in the best of the new songs are references to their ancient cousins. The melody of “Silver Dagger” borrows a bit from “You Are My Sunshine” and the six-minute “Tennessee” may be a feminine, but equally bleak, take on the hillbilly chestnut “Moonshiner.”

When the pace does pick up, it’s just barely with songs like the drug overdose cautionary tale “The Way it Goes” and the bruising “Scarlet Town.”

“On the day I came to town/ You promised I’d be your bride/ But you left me here to rot/ Like holly on a mountainside,” she sings in the latter.

Dawes

“Nothing is Wrong”

ATO

In the two years since their debut, the L.A.-based Dawes have so thoroughly perfected their jangly, 1970s California rock that it will surprise no one to hear Jackson Browne himself warbling through the splendid “Fire Away.”

 Other sun-baked, post-Hippie giants also get their due, with nods to early Neil Young, The Eagles, Tom Petty and even lighter fare like Poco and Firefall. Their lyrics, however, are clearly drawn from their new life on the road since hitting big with their impressive “North Hills” in 2009.

 “These days my friends don’t seem to know me without a suitcase in my hand,” frontman Taylor Goldsmith sings in the album’s very first line.

The melancholy “My Way Back Home” builds to a nice guitar showdown, while the harder driving “How Far We’ve Come” also draws from the loneliness and futility of falling in love on the road.   

“If I Wanted Someone” could have been the B-side to Young’s “Down By the River” and the sweet ballad “Moon on the Water” has a nice Byrds feels to it.

In the end, nothing on “Nothing Is Wrong” plows any new musical territory. But, so what. The songs are good ones and they whip up plenty of nostalgia for the early days of FM summer radio.

 

The Rosebuds

“Loud Planes Fly Low”

Merge Records

With the divorce of founding Rosebuds Kelly Crisp and Ivan Howard, you’d think the North Carolina band’s new album would join the cannon of great break-up albums.

But, there’s no “Blood on the Tracks” here.

The partnership continues, at least musically, and that’s a good thing. It’s the interplay of their voices, the sharing of their domestic intimacies, the quarrels, the occasional dullness, that has made their songs so compelling.



Much of that remains. While their first album was called, “The Rosebuds Make Out,” this could be “The Rosebuds Move On (and Stay Friends).”

 “I’m the last one to understand,” Crisp sings in the driving “Come Visit Me.” “I want to feel something way out here.”

In “Go Ahead,” Howard imagines a romantic do-over in a magical forest where they can run free all day and sleep in the branches on a pile of Crisp’s dresses. And, while songs like “Limitless Arms” and “Bird of Paradise” are hopeful, there’s still a dark weight of regret pressing down on them.

For even long-time fans, listening all the way to the closer, “Worthwhile,” takes some fortitude. But, as always, these are good songs, each of them catchy in their own perverse way.