Didn’t It Rain, Amy Helm, eOne
Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, Red House
During the last decade of his life, Levon Helm — the irrepressible drummer, singer and mandolinist best known for his tenure in the Band — routinely held court at his barn studio in Woodstock, New York. The Midnight Ramble, his regular get-together there, featured a trusted corps of musicians and frequent drop-ins by famous guests. A prized pilgrimage for fans of American roots music, it has kept going, off and on, since Helm died in 2012.
His daughter, singer-songwriter Amy Helm, is among those now tending the flame. So are guitarist and singer-songwriter Larry Campbell and singer Teresa Williams. It’s probably an accident of timing that Helm’s debut solo album, Didn’t It Rain, arrives on the heels of Campbell and Williams’ own self-titled debut. But it’s surely no accident that both albums were made at the barn, sharing some core personnel and a tastefully rustic sound. (They’d sit companionably on a merch table at Brooklyn Bowl, where the Midnight Ramble Band is due to perform on Aug. 11.)
Helm, 44, has a hale and limber voice, and her album partly underscores her affinities with classic soul: She belts the spiritual Didn’t It Rain (borrowing a bit of phrasing from Mavis Staples), as well as the Sam Cooke tune Good News (ditto, from Aretha Franklin). A few originals, like Rescue Me, reach for a similar style, with results more solid than soaring.
Where Helm truly excels — as she has proved in Rambles past and with the gospel-folkish group Ollabelle — is in the mining of emotional subtleties within a song. She’s touchingly vulnerable on Gentling Me, by Mary Gauthier and Beth Nielsen Chapman, and quietly confiding on Deep Water, which like most of the album’s originals was written with Byron Isaacs, her former Ollabelle bandmate.
Isaacs plays bass on Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, which mainly consists of Campbell’s songs: brokenhearted waltzes like Did You Love Me at All along with roadhouse fare like Bad Luck Charm. It’s a more countrified album, with the two singers, partners by marriage, often harmonizing in a rough blend. Things work best when Williams takes the lead — as on Midnight Highway, a gem of bittersweet longing, written with Julie Miller.
One track, the country chestnut You’re Running Wild, features Levon Helm on drums, exerting his subtle forward pull. It was recorded in his final years — as were three tracks on Didn’t It Rain, including Heat Lightning, a springy gospel two-step; and Sing to Me, a slow shuffle whose lyrics, by Amy Helm, now land with the weight of an elegy:
Sing to me
Let your drums call out and
Carry me
Through the silent trouble
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The Blade , Ashley Monroe, Warner Bros/Warner Music Nashville
Jessie Jones’ first solo album shuffles through a pile of projected musical identities: It’s pop-folk-garage-meditation-art-song or something like that, sometimes all together in four-minute blocks.
Jones was once the young singer in Feeding People, a semi-psychedelic band from Orange County, California, that broke up a couple of years ago; then and still, her voice has a foghorn mode and a playful, singsongy one. More recently she’s sung with Death Valley Girls, who have organized some great straight-ahead biker-rock songs out of noisy riffs.
But this album, arranged with organ and violin and horns, and produced by Bobby Harlow (who has a reputation out West as a master of analog, live-to-tape recording, in as few takes as possible), is her own moment of emergence as a singer-songwriter.
It all sounds quickly made, yet clear and confident. (The exception in all ways is Mental Illness, the short final track: frank and spare, like a diary entry, with cassette-recorder sonics.) It’s also Southern California to its core, full of songs about journeys and dreams and enchantments and presentiments. “No possession/I believe in true cuckoo prediction,” she sings in Quicksilver Screen.
She has a library of predigital pop styles filed away in her head and wants to use them. (Her imagination combines light and dark echoes from the ‘60s — the Doors, Love, the Velvet Underground.) And she’s a talented songwriter, especially when she can get a song to find its own primary, coherent identity.
Make It Spin, rosy and bouncy and cleverly wrought in all its sections, is a good example of that. Elsewhere, you can hear the hard shifts among styles either as lack of anxiety or centerlessness. Prisoner’s Cinema is first slack reggae and then a sort of spacey waltz; Lady La De Da begins with a slow, rumbling violin drone and moves into a tight, motorik dance beat; La Loba moseys along as a stagy, Kurt Weill-ish ballad, until the tempo accelerates and the surf guitar rumbles in.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Burger, Jessie Jones, Burger Records
It’s completely possible that Ashley Monroe watched the recent controversy in country music about the presence and power of female singers at the genre’s center - or lack thereof — with a shrug. For years now, she’s essentially opted out of discussions like that in favor of making impressive small-scale music that answers only to itself, and to country’s varied history, not its narrow present.
In 2013, she released the elegantly scarred Like a Rose, a striking album that showed her to be a sly, progressive songwriter and a nimble, tradition-minded singer. At its best, The Blade, her follow-up, continues that arc.
Monroe is a quietly confident singer: Her casually melting voice does real damage, as on If the Devil Don’t Want Me and on the title track, where she sings affectingly about losing love. The only theatrics she applies are in the moments, as on I’m Good at Leavin’ and Winning Streak (“Well my mind is unadjusted, and my guitar strings are rusted/Had somebody that I trusted leave me broke and busted”), where she scrunches her voice into what amounts to a loving exaggeration of a Southern accent.
The album is produced by Vince Gill, who’s lately become country’s institutional memory, and Justin Niebank. Together, they locate Monroe in traditions from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘90s, styles better suited to her voice and her disposition. (She’s also a member of Pistol Annies, a neo-traditionalist side project with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley.) The Blade recalls most loudly the 2004 self-titled debut album by Julie Roberts, another singer with solid bona fides and few people appreciating her.
So Monroe is an outsider, and a happy one, seemingly not compelled to make the sorts of compromises that pepper the latest album by another country skeptic, Kacey Musgraves, who always mixes sugar with her salt. On Dixie, this album’s most Southern-sounding song, Monroe keeps her voice prim, her words sharp, her attitude unfiltered:
I’m so tired of paying, praying for my sins
Lord get me out of Dixieland
In Jesus’ name, amen
It was the mines that killed my daddyvIt was the law that killed my man
It was the Bible belt that whipped me
When I broke the Fifth Command
Now, I don’t hate the weather
Now, I don’t hate the land
But if I had it my way
I’d never see this place again
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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