Now that we’ve started to descend the south face of the year, watch how those records that have been floating our flotilla throughout ‘06 begin elbowing and shouldering one another out of the way as the finish line approaches.
I’m keeping an open mind at the minute (fool that I am, I always, always light a candle for another Dexy’s opus), but I’ve made sure to ring-fence two places in my top five for Isobel Campbell and Jenny Lewis.
Much common ground gets tilled by Ballad Of The Broken Seas and Rabbit Fur Coat – which is hardly surprising when you consider how both records are the work of female songwriters who made their names with other groups (Belle and Sebastian and Rilo Kiley) before, once on their lonesome, deciding to bring their music all the way back home.
Sometime in the last year, while fighting for bunkspace in the sprawling Broken Social Scene and Stars collectives, Amy Millan decided to follow a similar route – trading indie chic for country-folk – and so we have Honey From The Tombs, a debut record that, while too hygienic for spit, and too house-proud for sawdust, shows the Toronto singer trying to scrub down as best as she can.
With a voice that calls to mind a gin-drenched ingénue of the Hope Sandoval school, hopes are high that Millan will pass her sweetheart of the rodeo audition with some ease – and in places, most notably ‘He Brings Out The Whiskey In Me’, ‘All The Miles’ and ‘Skinny Boy’, she comes close.
More often though, these strummed sketches and hit-and-hope busks are simply not interesting enough to hold our attention – lacking the brooding grandeur of Campbell and Lewis’ pop sensibility, they suggest that Millan is better served by her day job(s) than she maybe wants to admit.