Music recommendation: Stars Fall Home

[djonn]

A few of the folks in the gallery have known me long enough to recall that my musical preferences are generally describable as . . . obscure, running strongly toward '50s/'60s folk, show tunes, Muppets, and certain old-school corners of country, with a few nods toward the pop end of rock & roll.  [And of course there's filk, out of the SF/F community, but that's largely covered under the folk umbrella.]

Boy, are they about to be surprised....

See, I got a shiny new CD in the mail Friday.  Stars Fall Home is the second album from Seanan McGuire, aka cadhla -- and it is very, very cool indeed.  It is also about three orders of magnitude more straight-ahead alternative sound than twilight2000 (who probably has the best idea of my usual tastes of anyone here) would have expected me to pre-order in a hundred years.

It's a little tricky to pin down just exactly what Seanan's musical niche is.  There are several songs here that belong on the jukebox at your favorite truck stop, Fifties-era diner, and/or country-music bar & grill.  These include "Pretty Little Dead Girl" (phantom hitchhiker legends meet the Andrews Sisters; "shoo-waa" ensues), "Country Song" (Wynonna Judd channels Roger Corman), and "Paper Moon" (Reba McIntyre this time, channeling Joss Whedon).

There are the numbers in which Seanan invokes an eerily accurate jazz-era torch singer motif: "Downhome Aphrodite" (Greek myth meets Bogart and Bacall), "Four-Color Love" (Ella Fitzgerald as superheroic seductress), and "Take Advantage of Me" (recorded in the speakeasy at the back of the north wind).

There's a pair of almost-purely traditional folk ballads.  "Follow Me Down" opens the album, a cycle-of-seasons song notable for its brisk pace, simple arrangement, and strong bodhran line.  "In This Sea" is intriguing, at once a classic selkie tale and a subtle double-reverse of the usual story.

There's a pair of straight-ahead folk-rock numbers.  "This is My Town" is half-sedate and half-provocative, at once forthright and mysterious.  A line in "Dorothy" describes the protagonist as "a twister in the body of a girl"; one might as accurately refer to lightning captured in song. 

There are a pair of multi-voiced love songs: "River Lies" is a sultry, slow, star-crossed romance in counterpoint; "Sycamore Tree" is equally star-crossed but features three voices looping almost cheerfully in and out and around and past each other.

And then there are the fusions.  "Evil Laugh" features a Tyrannosaurus Rex delivering a clever country-rock cautionary tale.  "Still Catch the Tide" -- the only number on the album not written by Seanan herself -- has its roots in the same folk traditions behind "In This Sea", but both lyrics and arrangement are more upbeat, with an almost classical harp backing that fooled me more than once into thinking it was a wonderfully light piano.  And "Earthquake Weather" is . . . remarkable.  From a haunting opening that would be pure folk if not for the slightly understated air raid siren (!), it takes an intricate archetypical voyage through a storyscape and mood that begins as folk and picks up energy and instrumentality as it goes, building to a full-on folk-rock climax.

I should note here that this album sets a very high standard for independently produced material.  Seanan does all her own lead vocals; backing vocals, a host of fine instrumental work, and studio engineering is handled by a large pool of talented musicians spanning two continents.  There's also a fully professional illustrated lyric booklet; this is an album that delivers its money's worth and then some.


Those who've followed my book-reviewing career will know that I don't often apply unreserved superlatives.  I am going to apply one now: Seanan McGuire is the single most amazingly skilled songwriter I have ever encountered, and a first-rate singer into the bargain.  If you are even remotely a fan of folk, folk-rock, or good female singers in general, then you want Stars Fall Home, available here while supplies last.  If you know a radio DJ whose playlist isn't corporate-controlled, that DJ needs a copy.  Forget American Idol, ignore America's Got Talent, don't bother with Rock Star: [insert group here].  This is as good as it gets.