This album can't be reviewed (at least by me) without reference to the
reviewer's age and era. As I listened to the CD, the music and vocal style
evoked Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, and a more delicate Peter, Paul, and
Mary - candles and incense...wall hangings made from Indian bedspreads...the
smell of a certain illegal substance. The artists mention as their influences
The Byrds, the Everly Brothers, and Roy Orbison.
Pete and Maura Kennedy state in the liner notes that these songs were written
during their tour of the British Isles. They were especially influenced by Irish
"melody and lyricism", leading them, in this album, to place the more importance
on the sound of words and on imagery than on meaning.
Several of the songs are especially rich in visual and aural imagery such as,
"And the jangle dreams and the red guitars/Flow like a river of fallen stars"
(River of Fallen Stars), or "Silent riders/bridge of visions/ Midnight
lanterns/Gleaming". Other songs that showcase their ability to create a sense of
place include the list of street names that makes up the song Chelsea
Embankment, and "Sunday on Stephen's Green/Dublin's a mist of dreams/Black
umbrellas opened out/Against the rain" (Stephen's Green).
All but two of the songs were written by the Kennedys. My own favorite is
Fortune Teller Road. It stands out from all the others in the starkness of the
imagery and the modal quality of the melody, which together produce an eeriness
that carries through beautifully in Maura's delivery. Note the refrain: "River
gods and holy altars/Midnight rain and bones/There's a lonely meeting place/On
Fortune Teller Road".
Maura sings solo or lead vocal on 5 of the 13 songs; the others are duets
with Pete. My own preference is for her solo work, with her clear and
unpretentious voice, in contrast to the sweet harmonies of the duets. This
latter mellowness is at odds with the intensity of the lyrics. This is most
evident on the songs written Richard Thompson and Tom Kimmels.
This is a successful album, but one likely to be appreciated most by those
who like the folk-rock of the '70's and the "new acoustic" or "new Celtic" music
of the '90's.
The most obvious thing to say about Pete and Maura
Kennedy is that they would like to be Richard and Linda Thompson. And, as with
most really obvious things, this one has an element of truth, and an element of
pointlessly annoying stupidity. Yes, on the one hand, they appear to be a
married folk-music couple, and they do sing "Wall of Death", which for your
average Cypress Hill fan may well make them and the Thompsons virtually
indistinguishable. Even at this superficial level, though, the differences
aren't very hard to spot. The Kennedys' is a much more even collaboration, with
both of them playing guitar and singing, and sharing writing credits on nine of
these thirteen songs. They also don't really have any of the Thompsons'
unnerving brink-of-self-annihilation edge; their rendition of "Wall of Death" is
a nice study in vocal harmony, but the original, from Richard and Linda's
harrowingly classic album Shoot Out the Lights, is a claustrophobic
exercise in frustrated powerlessness. Still, if there weren't a Thompson cover
on this album, it wouldn't have fit in with the theme of the CDs my parents got
me for my birthday last month, and so I would almost certainly never have heard
it.
Because that was my introduction to this album,
though, it took me a couple trips through it to realize that the Thompson-esque
straight folk parts aren't, in my opinion, the Kennedys' strength. They're both
competent singers and guitarists, but the individual elements aren't the
foundation of their style the way Richard's guitar and Linda's voice were. In
place of those virtues, the Kennedys here offer three distinct things that you
might not want to overlook even if you don't frequent the "Folk" aisles.
First, they, bassist Stu Voorman and drummer Stumpy
Joe Jr. make a quite plausible country/folk rock band. Maura's voice has a clean
twang to it, the guitars chime cheerily, and Stumpy's drumming has a square,
well, stumpiness to it, eminently suited to dances you can do in cowboy
boots. "Wall of Death" is basically done this way, as is the Tom Kimmel/Stan
Lynch composition "House on Fire" (on which the imprint of Lynch's day job with
the Heartbreakers is clearly evident). Of the duo's own songs, the solid "Same
Old Way", the mournful ballad "Day In and Day Out", the jangly "Winterheart",
and Maura's requiem for her mother, "Life Goes On Without You" (which reminds me
strongly, as things frequently seem to, of Beth Nielsen Chapman), all fit into
this oeuvre. They do a good job with the style, and if this were all River of
Fallen Stars had to offer, I'd still hang on to the CD, but as a
clinically-certified completist I basically hang on to everything; remember:
it's not trash if you don't throw it away. (Actually, the "clinically-certified"
part was an improvisation, but if anybody does know of such a certification
program, I'd be interested to hear the details. I think with the right medical
affidavit I could get a healthy discount on the purchase of anything totally
redundant or otherwise pathetically inessential for normal human existence,
which for me would probably amount to a substantial savings before very
long.)
The second thing Pete and Maura do well is a sort
of modern day variant of the thin, elegant harmonies of those equally noble folk
progenitors, Simon and Garfunkel, in their occasional serious moments (i.e., not
the songs with lines like "I get up to wash my face, and when I come back to bed
someone's taken my place", or "I've lost my harmonica, Albert"). "Month of
Hours" sounds to me like a very young Paul and Art inexplicably given a
mid-period REM backing track to sing something akin to "So Long, Frank Lloyd
Wright" over, which would be especially confusing for them since that song was
from their final album. "Chelsea Embankment", whose spare lyrics are entirely
composed of London street names, reminds me a little of "April Come She Will".
"Spirit Compass" doesn't remind me of any specific S&G song, but it's very
much of a set with the other two. And in a way "Fortune Teller Road" reminds me
of the Story (the guitars, mostly, not the singing), who I was set to champion
as this decade's answer to Paul and Art before Jennifer Kimball decided (not
unreasonably) that touring was a big pain in the ass. And, again, if this thread
was all that this album was woven out of, it'd be a pretty interesting album,
worth investigating.
But honestly, the reason I keep being inextricably
drawn to the disc is the presence of just two songs, on which Pete and Maura
transcend their usual perfectly admirable competence and achieve something
thoroughly remarkable. If I were to make a single out of them, "River of Fallen
Stars" would clearly be the title track. The cycling guitar parts are pure and
breathtakingly free of anything even vaguely disharmonic. Bass and some subtle
drums give the song some additional body, and over it Maura's achingly guileless
voice soars, singing lines whose deliberate near-nonsensicality in print somehow
seems appropriate in song ("And from down in the valley / Where the gospel
horses run, / All the way to the midnight bridge / Where the flags of victory
are hung..."). In place of Pete's usual vocal harmony is a tasteful resonating
wisp of electric guitar feedback that licks at the edges of the melody like the
tongue of a curious dragon (I'm really sorry about that overwrought simile,
though obviously not quite sorry enough to remove it). The liner notes explain
that this song was inspired by Giant's Causeway, in Ireland somewhere. I have no
idea what kind of a place that really is, but this song makes me envision a sort
of cross between a windswept world's-end coastline (the one in my mind, I
realize, also comes from vicarious experience: it is the one off of which Frank
Churchill throws the shreds of spiral-notebook paper from his abandoned first
draft at the end of Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "'A History of the
Twentieth Century, With Illustrations'") and Rivendell.
The flip side of the single would be, appropriately
enough, the Dublin ode "Stephen's Green". In parts this is the most
Simon-and-Garfunkel-like song of all of the ones here, with Pete and Maura's
duet veering alarmingly close to the timbres of "Scarborough Fair", but the
insistent guitar part gives it a rhythmic gait that carries it for me, and turns
it from a languid choral exercise into an auspiciously hummable pop song. The
reference to Grafton Street also serves as a nod to Nanci Griffith's song of
that name on her last album, which I would expect is intentional, given that she
receives the liner notes' concluding thank-you.
Green Linnet, the staunch folkie label on which
this CD appears, seems to realize that the album has crossover aspirations, as
they've optimistically inscribed "File Under Folk/Rock/Pop" in a corner of the
back cover, but this gesture fails to acknowledge three important truths: 1)
Anything arriving at a major record chain with "Green Linnet" on the return
address is going to go straight into the folk/Celtic annex, even if it's
plastered with Cannibal Corpse decals; 2) Anything whose back cover mentions
"folk" has got ten seconds to also cough up Lou Barlow's name, or it's into the
annex as well; and 3) even if the label name was edited to "Green Lantern", and
the injunction thereon altered to "File under: Erratic Blowtorch Opera", the
best a CD with this one's back cover photo of two patently goofy individuals
holding acoustic guitars can hope for is that it's mistaken for a Timbuk 3 side
project (ironically, the Kennedys do live in Austin), and liberated from the
folk ghetto only to be placed with the rest of the Timbuk 3 records, usually
right beside the collected works of Saigon Kick in a bin labeled "Special Offers
-- $2.99-$5.99".