From: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org (jinglejangle-digest) To: jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Subject: jinglejangle-digest V7 #75 Reply-To: jinglejangle@smoe.org Sender: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jinglejangle-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jinglejangle-digest Thursday, May 13 2004 Volume 07 : Number 075 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [MLL] glenn mcdonald review of Baby Blue [Michael Zwirn Subject: [MLL] glenn mcdonald review of Baby Blue This follows reviews of the reissue of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and the new Mascott album, Dreamer's Book. See www.furia.com/twas Mary Lou Lord: Baby Blue In a sense, though, "Masterpiece" is a death wish. I don't wish Rumors' fate on Dreamer's Book, in any sense, most vehemently not the one that ends with me basically resenting being reminded of the thing at all. Inherent in my personal listening bias, probably, is a kind of indelible prejudice for transience. I adore fragility and misjudgments and heresies, songs that feel irresistibly compelled to waive their chances at immortality in order to make some haplessly incomprehensible point of their own. Part of the appeal of Dreamer's Book, for me, is that its achievements are just classical enough for me to imagine them deserving a small degree of universality, but sufficiently oblique that they're unlikely to ever actually be considered on that scale. The problem with Rumors is that it's too easy. It might be the most likable album ever made, and what lasting good does it do to learn to love something nobody can resist? If Dreamer's Book seems a little too easy to you, too, it might help to alternate it with my second-favorite album of the moment, Mary Lou Lord's Baby Blue. Lord can barely sing in the best of times, and made this album while suffering from vocal problems that even by her own standards nearly muted her. She has moments of presence, but inspiringly few of them, and she wisps through most of this record on sheer and inexplicable persistence. Her uneven career aches for a defiant breakthrough, a Jagged Little Pill or an 0304 or something, and Baby Blue is so vividly not it that I can barely believe Nick Salomon didn't just put a hand on her forehead and then send her back to bed. She's given up any substantial pretense of writing her own material (nine of these fourteen songs are Saloman's, two more he co-wrote, "Fearless" is a Pink Floyd cover and "Baby Blue" is the Badfinger song this time, leaving exactly one song credited to Mary Lou by herself), and it's tempting to wonder, in no way rhetorically, why she bothers. At least, I'm tempted to wonder why she bothers until I start listening, and then I remember why I don't care. She's a hapless singer, and Salomon is a perilously defocusable writer, but when their limitations line up they can amplify and cancel each other as well as any two people's flaws ever mesh. Their grand prize this time, the ringingly simple folk-rock anthem "The Wind Blew All Around Me", reconciles the Byrds, Dan Bern, Bob Mould, the Alarm and the Thompsons, and seems destined to be cherished and butchered by the next two or three generations of subway buskers. As seems to be Salomon and Lord's pattern, it's the first song on the record and probably everything else drags down the average, but while that may be a serious structural flaw in the download era, the album isn't in iTMS yet, so maybe the rest of it will get a chance. The "Leaves That Are Green"-ish "43" is nearly Stina Nordenstam hushed. "Baby Blue" is a particularly dubious title-track pick, since a much better-known weak-voiced Boston singer already did it, but for me Saloman's snarly guitar and Jules Fenton's clattery drums justify another pass. "Cold Kilburn Rain" is somewhere between Darden Smith and Game Theory. "Farming It Out" is a 1:25 folk gem good enough to nominate Mary Lou for Christine Lavin's old slot in Four Bitchin' Babes, and "The Inhibition Twist" is a jubilant 1:54 punk strut worthy of an old Blake Babies record. "Because He's Leaving" is a patient lullaby, "Someone Always Talks" a snapping protest warning, "Stars Burn Out" a sprawling Neil Young yowl, "Ron" a wheezy Dylan nod. The Pink Floyd cover perplexes me, but "Old Tin Tray" returns to Richard Thompson's Celtic-folk vein, and reminds me happily of the Waterboys in one of their leprechaun phases. So I think Salomon did the right thing. "You're sure you want to sing?" She nodded, he shrugged, and they made another record. This one isn't going to get grandly reissued twenty-seven years from now, and might be lucky to pay for Mary Lou's plane fare to England to record it. I don't know why she thinks she bothers, and none of the easy answers make much sense now that she seems to have excused herself from any scene in which it would help to antagonize Courtney Love or sound like Juliana Hatfield's consumptive sister. These songs will more likely gather singer/songwriter company, and really Mary Lou is neither. She's an interpreter, and we kind of don't have those any more. But we could, and maybe we should. Interpretation is an art of listening, and Mary Lou Lord listens excellently. I am trying and hoping to listen better. And Rumors is on the shelf and in my heart, and Dreamer's Book is in my dreams, and "The Wind Blew All Around Me" is starting in my headphones again, and maybe I'm doing fine. ------------------------------ End of jinglejangle-digest V7 #75 *********************************