First of all, the guy puts this in print not bothering to get Trisha
Yearwood's name spelled correctly.
Secondly, he hasn't paid attention to those who have said and proven that
they wanted to "get back to basics" and make "real country records" or the
labels who have signed artists having a more "country" feel. Vince Gill,
Dolly Parton, LeeAnn Womack, Patty Loveless, the return to form of Dwight
Yoakam, a hearty welcome back to Randy Travis, Alan Jackson still cranking
out country, Steve Wariner getting some due; or does this guy just judge
his country music by the crossover appeal of the likes of Rimes, Twain,
Brooks, McBride, Yearwood?
He may not be wrong with McBride though who has had some very good country
moments and who does have a gorgeous voice. "Evolution" is probably her
most pop-type record to date. "The Way That I Am" is a pretty good example
of her skills as a country singer. Maybe the pop/rock influence combined
with the vocal theatrics we've seen of late with mostly female country
singers is what his real gripe is.
"Trampoline" with its latin rhythms and that one
twenties-vaudeville-sung-through-a-megaphone-type-song may never have made a
big dent in the country charts, even a few years ago. Quite frankly, the
album is more of an alternative output than any other recording The
Mavericks have ever done.
Alison Krauss - may not be so much as a "barb" against her as trying to
prove his point - again a critic citing that production points toward the
"realness" of an artist. Real by whose standards? Is it by the production
quality which existed in the forties, fifities or sixties? Or is he saying
that a more pared-down accompaniment is crucial to "keeping it country".
Is country music really how many instruments one can bring to the recording
studio or is it really about feeling? Is this reviewer hearing lush
accompaniment and likens all such recordings to the bargain basement of
music or is he listening with an open mind. Is he wishing to jump on a
bandwagon of those critics who state everything which is wrong with country
music and glamorize their "hip" knowledge
by refusing to glamorize the "what's right" .
Tera
>Kelly Willis
>"What I Deserve"
>Rykodisc
>
>Flesh and blood
>KELLY WILLIS' NEW ALBUM, "WHAT I DESERVE," IS AN
>ANTIDOTE TO THE SLICKNESS THAT'S RUINED COUNTRY
>MUSIC.
>
> BY CHARLES TAYLOR |
> A few years ago, without
> really intending to, I
> stopped listening to most
> new country music.
> When the most
> enthusiasm I could
> muster for certain new
> records was, "Well, it's
> not as slick as it might
>be," I realized that I had simply stopped expecting
>the genre to produce anything much of interest. The
>slicking up of country music was nothing new; it had
>been going on at least since the countrypolitan sound
>of the '60s. But in the last few years that slickness
>has felt like a stake through the heart. I suppose I
>could learn to tell Shania's voice from Tricia's from
>Deana's from Mindy's if I put my mind to it. But
>nothing I've heard has made the trouble it would
>take seem worth it.
>
>More popular than ever, country music is also -- as
>a form -- more debased than ever. Turn to your
>local country station or switch on TNN and what
>you hear is less the country sound than
>representations of that sound, voices and guitars that
>twang as if they'd been programmed, everything
>stripped of the dirt of experience. The truth is that
>the themes country music has traditionally dealt with
>-- sin, loss and its acceptance, redemption or the
>refusal of it -- have no place in a genre that has been
>reduced to the manufactured emotion of party
>songs, empowerment songs (for the women singers),
>MOR ballads. The sort of schlocky material done by
>the singers that people in their 40s and late 30s grew
>up seeing on talk shows -- the likes of Jerry Vale,
>Sandler and Young, Vic Damone -- is now being
>churned out in a country idiom. The "rock" side of
>country is no less safe. For aging rock audiences, the
>flashy stage shows of performers like Garth Brooks
>or Shania Twain are a sort of security blanket,
>allowing people who long ago stopped paying
>attention to rock 'n' roll to feel as if they're still in
>the fold.
>
>The bright spots have been sparse. I continue
>listening to Martina McBride because, despite all the
>second-rate material and musicianship she settles
>for, I still hear a real person when she sings. (And
>I'm not ready to give up on anyone who delivered as
>powerful a performance as "Independence Day,"
>perhaps the greatest single of the decade, certainly
>the most subversive.) But McBride's success is not
>likely to encourage her to take on the material or
>sidemen that would challenge her. And I don't know
>when we're likely to hear another album from
>Bobbie Cryner, whose 1995 "Girl of Your Dreams,"
>the toughest set of marriage songs since Richard and
>Linda Thompson's "Shoot Out the Lights," showed
>how real feeling might be possible in the slick
>country mainstream. Country radio has become so
>rigidly formatted that a few years ago the Mavericks'
>last album, "Trampoline," which you might have
>expected to spawn hit after hit, was ignored as too
>rock 'n' roll (and ignored as too country by rock
>stations). After his last album, "Unchained," which
>got no airplay, won a Grammy, Johnny Cash took
>out ads in the industry trade publications in which he
>expressed thanks "to the Nashville music
>establishment and country radio for your support" --
>alongside a 1969 picture of him giving the finger to
>the camera. There's no better example of what's
>wrong with country radio than the fact that you
>won't hear artists like Shaver (whose "Tramp on
>Your Street" may be the finest country album of the
>decade) or Alison Krauss, perhaps the purest voice
>in country right now. The bits of slickness that crept
>into "So Long, So Wrong," the last album from
>Krauss and her band, Union Station, suggested she
>was in for a long, uncertain fight to continue playing
>her music the way she wanted.
>
>All this is by way of breathing a sigh of relief that
>Kelly Willis' new album, "What I Deserve," a title
>that seems both boastful and ironic, is a sure sign
>that she has rejected the mainstreaming moves of
>her last album, 1993's "Kelly Willis." Willis has
>sacrificed some of the rockabilly flavor of her first
>two albums, 1990's "Well Traveled Love" and
>1991's "Bang Bang." "What I Deserve" is a darker
>piece of work, and a more coherent one. The
>emotions and playing on the album are all of a piece,
>a darker piece. Which is why you're not likely to
>hear anything from "What I Deserve" on any
>airwaves near you. "No, you don't get off easy,"
>Willis sings toward the end of the record, and the
>line sticks because it comes at a time when country
>music is all about getting off easy, about disposable
>emotion. "What I Deserve" is about being in the grip
>of emotions so big they seem not as if they started
>inside the singer, but as if they were waiting around
>for her to get caught in their grip. And they don't
>sound as if they'll be dissipating any time soon. Not
>every song here is a sad song, but Willis has made
>the slow, easy roll of "I Got a Feelin' For Ya" feel of
>a piece with the heartbreak of "Wrapped," made us
>hear the potential for sadness lurking inside every
>happiness. The entire album is shot through with the
>fatalism that's particular to country. "You hold me
>close in your arms/And I feel the cold," she sings in
>the album's closer, "Not Long For This World," a
>song that lives up to the Fassbinder title: Love Is
>Colder than Death. Throughout "What I Deserve,"
>Willis sings as if to ward off that chill.
>
>"What I Deserve" was recorded in Austin, which has
>emerged as the anti-Nashville. But it doesn't wallow
>in the glumness that makes some alterna-country
>easier to admire than love. Willis may feel the
>shudder of mortality, but her delivery is palpably
>flesh-and-blood. She's never so hooked on misery
>that her timing and phrasing get dragged down into
>the atmospherics of a song. There's an essentially
>engaged quality to her singing. The title track is an
>admission of defeat that climaxes with the line "Hell,
>I've walked a long way just to find the end of my
>rope," that's as beaten-up and as specific as the
>scratches and cigarette scars on a barroom counter.
>Listening to "What I Deserve" brought home, for
>me, why I've never been able to join in the
>accolades that are regularly laid at the feet of
>Lucinda Williams. The heartache in Williams' songs
>finally counts for nothing because it's so unvaried,
>so wallowed in. Put it this way: Who can be
>bothered to care about the trials of a singer who
>sounds as if she doesn't have the energy to get
>through the goddamn verse?
>
>Willis never forgets that she has to put a song
>across. There are surges and sudden husky swoops
>in her normal, almost nasal, register. She's got
>wonderful taste in songwriters, here covering Nick
>Drake's "Time Has Told Me" and Paul Westerberg's
>"They're Blind." (The truest test for any artist's
>grasp of the genre they work in is what it can be
>made to encompass.) There's even a nod to the
>Beatles in her version of Paul Kelly's "Cradle of
>Love" ("Seems like you been workin'/Eight days a
>week"). The song itself is a particularly sweet
>example of solace as seduction. Willis might be the
>woman the singer in "A Hard Day's Night" dreams
>of coming home to, knowing the things that she does
>"will make him feel all right." And she's blessed
>throughout with wonderful musicians. On "Not
>Forgotten You," the beat slowly gathers itself behind
>Willis, unobtrusively propelling the music, so that by
>the time she gets to the image "Hail the Western
>bound/With its black tail flying" the music has
>become a song match for it.
>
>The album seems defined by "Happy Like That,"
>written by Willis and Gary Louris. All of the
>discontent of the album seems to gather itself into
>this number, and Willis sings it with the sound of
>someone bringing bad news that we know is
>undeniable before we can even question it. It's the
>sound of a sort of a doomed -- but not foolish --
>persistence. By the end of the final lines, Willis'
>voice, soaring at their start, has been tamped down.
>But the persistence of "What I Deserve" is equally
>undeniable. Six years (broken only by one EP) is
>three lifetimes in pop music. Willis was right to hold
>out until she found a label to release the music she
>wanted to make. "What I Deserve" is the album
>she's been working toward since her debut.
>Whatever its commercial fate, she's likely to be
>around for a while. Willis has found a way to
>navigate the emotional vapors while sounding too
>real, too strong to make us think she's in danger of
>disappearing into them.
>SALON | Feb. 24, 1999
>
>--
>Tom Mohr
>at the office: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>at the home: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
