CAR WHEELS ON A LEAFY ROAD: Kathleen Edwards. |
| Kathleen Edwards | with Justin Rutledge | 9:30 pm March 27 | at the Big Easy, 55 Market St, Portland | $15 | 207.775.2266 |
Asking for Flowers (Zoe) is the slickest album yet from Kathleen Edwards — the Canadian alt-country songwriter frequently heralded as the next Lucinda Williams — and her most raw. Her lyrics are a model of both empathy and frustration, touching on a broad sampler of issues — fame, racism, murder, jealousy — with unrelenting honesty. Edwards’s subject matter and lyrical devices are rarely original, but her sentiments cut deep. And with an impressive assortment of backup players for her third album, her arrangements finally do too.Her growth is most apparent on the album’s personal songs. Opener “Buffalo” tackles the frustrations of a hard-touring, mid-level performer — “I’d played a thousand one shows/What you need is to just come home” — with pregnant melodrama, a lush combination of electric twang (from touring-band member Colin Cripps), piano, and a string quartet (of which Edwards is a part).
“I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory” hits similar terrain with punchy sarcasm (“Heavy rotation on the CBC/Whatever in hell that really means”) and a jaunty mingling of Greg Leisz’s (Wilco, Lucinda Williams) pedal steel and Bob Packwood’s Hammond organ. The next track, “Oil Man’s War,” captures the resolve of a Vietnam-era draft-dodger fleeing to Canada with his girlfriend, and its title makes an obvious but still relevant nod to the war in Iraq.
The other full-throttle rockers on Asking for Flowers overcome gimmicky songwriting with fiery vocals and layered, rip-roaring electric guitar licks. The start of “The Cheapest Key” is too dopey for its own good — “A is for all the times I bit my tongue/B is for bullshit and you fed me some” (she goes all the way through G) — but it gets better after Edwards wears out her voice during an indignant chorus (“You always played me in the cheapest key”). “Oh Canada” riffs off her homeland’s national anthem, then accuses the media of institutional racism. The lyrics are hit or miss, but the song powerfully underlines the exhausted candor that pervades Edwards’s writing.
Always confident in that up-tempo terrain, Edwards is positively commanding on the album’s more subdued tracks. Her emotions are more flexible — she can only really hit feisty and angry on the rock numbers — allowing for nuances of weakness in her blunt confessions. The title track is a peak of lyrical subtlety, as Edwards calls out a long-term boyfriend and draws blood with muted resignation (“Every pill I took in vain”).
“Scared at Night” is delivered like a Heartbreaker-era Ryan Adams ballad, each line hitting both staccato and grace notes, arranged with little more than Edwards’s acoustic guitar and short electric/steel pedal bridges. Justin Rutledge, who opens the Edwards gig on March 27 at the Big Easy, offers backing vocals with an understated ache.
Asking for Flowers will likely be another breakthrough for Kathleen Edwards, as she carries her weight against considerable studio muscle and forges a distinctive voice in an often homogeneous genre. Even the Lucinda Williams references take a nap until the album’s closing track, “Goodnight, California,” where Edwards’s vocals are reverbed to a hypnotic pitch and her lyrics hit the sexy, plaintive pitch that marks Williams’s personality-driven appeal. She nails a final couplet (“I won’t let you in my heart/But you are always on my mind”) and the song drifts away on an extended jam so moody and apt that you can’t shake those final words.
Christopher Gray can be reached at cgray@phx.com.
