Little Big Town, “The Reason Why” (Capitol Nashville)
“Rain on a Tin Roof” was buried deep on Julie Roberts’ magnificent 2004 debut album, the 10th track of 11, and maybe only the seventh-best. But it had teeth as an ambivalent declaration of love for a fickle man and sung with a weighty sigh.
A version of that song appears late on “The Reason Why,” Little Big Town’s fourth album. But where Roberts’ version was damp and lonely, this one is uncommitted, and almost comfortable, as if there’s not a single cloud looming in the sky.
So it goes with Little Big Town, a country group that almost always chooses politesse over tension, letting its precise, sometimes clinical harmony stand in for feeling. The group is made up of two women, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, and two men, Phillip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook, with vocals distributed in roughly equal measure among them.
Redolent of Southern gospel and feather-light country- rock, it’s a comfort zone for this group, employed consistently in the choruses, which can be arrestingly sharp, and often elsewhere. (The breakthrough 2005 hit, “Boondocks,” is the apogee of this tendency.) But piled on top of plangent guitars, the convergence can become grating, with all the emotion of archery, or some other sport that prizes accuracy above all.
Jon Caramanica, The New York Times
Land of Talk, “Cloak and Cipher”(Saddle Creek)
Elizabeth Powell, the singer-songwriter and guitarist behind Land of Talk, can give the impression of a chronic recluse gamely making the best of human interaction.
That isn’t unusual for an artist, though it may be a little odd for someone operating in a self-styled Canadian indie- rock utopia. Powell recently toured and recorded as a member of Broken Social Scene.
But on “Cloak and Cipher,” the new Land of Talk album, she relinquishes not an ounce of control. The title suggests her state of mind: What she’s seeking is obscurity, in one willful form or another. She’s good at finding it, but sometimes not to her benefit.
At root, Land of Talk is an economical three-piece, with Eoin O Laoghaire on bass and Andrew Barr on drums. Powell works well with these parameters, building songs out of coil-sprung riffs and soaring refrains. But she sometimes thickens the broth with guests from other Montreal bands, like Stars and Besnard Lakes, whose lead singer, Jace Lasek, helped produce the album.
The graceful constant is Powell’s small but penetrating singing voice, which she uses deftly. She knows when to sweeten her tone and when to go steely, and with one exception — “Hate I Won’t Commit,” in which she seems to be evoking an inebriated Rickie Lee Jones — she doesn’t draw attention to her musical calculations. Nate Chinen, The New York Times
