About Me
Choice pick:
Amy Allison – Everything and Nothing Too.Her best, strongest collection of songs. That’s quite
an achievement for someone who already has a couple of
genuine classic albums under her belt, The Maudlin
Years and Sad Girl. Allison is a master of the mot
juste, the double or triple or quadruple entendre: no
wonder Elvis Costello likes her so much. Until lately,
she wrote country songs imbued with an inimitably
droll wit and charm: it’s hard not to fall for the
elegantly phrased klutz in all things romantic that
she played to the hilt earlier in her career. But it’s
never easy to tell whether she’s laying it on the
line, messing with your head or doing both at the same
time, and that’s the secret to her success. That, and
that exquisite voice, which has taken on a darker tone
recently, with a gravitas that didn’t used to creep
into her often sidesplittingly funny lyrics.
Technically speaking, she’s a terrific singer with
soaring range and surprising power for someone whose
twangy timbre falls thisclose to cartoonish. That she
took that voice, ran with it and made it a thing of
such strange, unique beauty testifies to her smarts as
a musician (probably runs in the family: her dad is
saloon jazz legend Mose Allison, without whom Tom
Waits probably wouldn’t exist, or at the least
wouldn’t be so popular).Like her criminally underrated previous album No
Frills Friend, this one is basically pop songs set to
jangly, mostly midtempo guitar rock arrangements, a
style Allison has mastered as she did country music,
ten years ago. The cd kicks off with Don’t Go to
Sleep, a jazzy pop gem that sounds like a dead ringer
for something from mid-60s London. The next two
tracks, Don’t You Know Anything and the album’s title
track highlight Allison’s knowingly wise, terse
lyricism. The fast, bouncy Out of Sight, Out of Mind
wouldn’t be out of place on one of her country albums.Right about here, it gets dark in a hurry. The next
cut Troubled Boy, a snapshot of a (predictably)
failed romance between a couple of troubled people,
only hints at what’s to come. After that, Allison
takes no prisoners on the
what-on-earth-do-you-see-in-that-loser diatribe Have
You No Pride? Then the sun sinks under the horizon,
with Rose Red:Snow White, Snow White
I’m Rose Red
Keep the wolf from my door
I will be a hothouse flower
And I’ll never go out anymoreIt’s one of her most affecting and powerful songs, as
is the album’s centerpiece, the suicide anthem Turn
Out the Lights.In my room
Far from the crowd
My bed’s a tomb
My quilt’s a shroud
I’ve had my fill
Of restless nights
I’d just as soon
Turn out the lightsIt’s arguably her best song, an apt companion piece to
the equally haunting title track from her previous
album (sung from the point of view of a woman who’s so
lonely that she’s willing to go out with a guy who
literally won’t say a word to her). But just as
everything seems to be ready to fall into the abyss,
the album picks up with a rousingly guitarish cover
of Morrissey’s vitriolic classic Every Day is Sunday,
and concludes with a charming duet between Allison and
her dad on his song Was – peep her website for the
youtube video, http://www.amyallisonmusic.comAmy Allison is hilarious onstage: if you haven’t seen
her you owe it to yourself, you are in for a treat.Alan Young
http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/review-amy-alli
son-everything-and-nothing-too/
