Kate Rusby
Awkward Annie
(Pure Records)
You pretty much know what to expect from a Kate Rusby album: traditional folk songs, a few originals, the occasional cover. Awkward Annie is her latest. It sports five originals, including the whimsical title track, but they are so similar in feel to the others you’ll have to consult the liner notes to differentiate them. The arrangements are richer than usual, there’s more upbeat material and Rusby tackles a Ray Davies song, but the fragile-as-glass, sweet-as-spring nectar voice makes this unmistakably a Kate Rusby album. These days performers invent nonsense categories to avoid using the “f” word, but Kate Rusby waves her folk credentials in “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it” defiance. It works—she outsells the weasel wormers. And so she should.
—Rob Weir
The Fiery Furnaces
Widow City
(Thrill Jockey)
This brother-sister duo is willfully weird, always working to destabilize everything. Chopped-off beats make phrases stumble, thwarting your ears’ search for any regularity. But Fiery Furnaces should be commended for making challenging, verbose songs with odd narrative elements straight out of a short story collection. The band sounds like TV on the Radio joined with Stephen Sondheim, Rush and David Bowie to make a crazed song cycle. Whiplash meter changes, unsettling modulations, and dynamic switches keep this ambitious music from ever being remotely easy.
—John Adamian
Pieta Brown
Remember the Sun
(One Little Indian)
Pieta Brown is the daughter of bad-boy folk rocker Greg Brown. What she shares with her dad is a vocal style imbued with a laid-back nonchalance. But both are very serious about their craft. Pieta has a cool, bluesy delivery. She consistently delivers intense narratives about people in extremis, driven home this time by an insistent, Memphis-born rhythmic pulse and enough hooks to fill a tackle box. On Remember the Sun, Brown adds hot sauce to what had been a spare Americana recipe, and succeeds in holding down the dark core of her always compelling story songs.
—Jim Motavalli
PJ Harvey
White Chalk
(Island)
PJ Harvey fans have made peace with her restless musical spirit. Sometimes she coos, sometimes she shrieks. Sometimes she makes pop, sometimes she makes noise. On her latest—her eighth studio recording and her first since 2004—Harvey abandons the growls, distortion and force of her earlier work and settles for dark, plodding, minor-key piano dirges, and bleak-folk laments. She sounds a little like Regina Spektor on lithium. Followers of her career won’t be too surprised, even if they pine for a return to the mass and gravity of 1995’s To Bring You My Love.
—John Adamian
