djonn | I've been forgetting.... (Reply)

....to comment here on one of my most satisfying entertainment purchases for the summer. No, not the movie tickets to Superman Returns or Dead Man's Chest (the first was Weird; the second was swashbuckling).

No, not the theater tickets either (there having been no forgetting involved).

No, this almost-too-late consumer alert is intended to make you run right out to your local Internet and acquire your minimum annual nutritional requirement of zombies, ghosts, wood-sprites, and other relentlessly introspective natural, unnatural, and supernatural creatures. You need a copy of Seanan McGuire's Pretty Little Dead Girl, and you need it now (before she closes out the online order form).

If you didn't know ahead of time that this was a filk CD -- specifically, a live album recorded at 2005's Ohio Valley FilkFest -- you might very well go looking for it in the country-folk-rock section of your local music retailer, next to the Reba McIntyre discs. The vocals are polished, the tunes are wistful and hopeful and sad in all the right proportions, and while you might be a little startled at the number of fairy-tale metaphors, there are also rivers and wildwoods and small-town diners right out of the country-music artistic palette.

At the same time, there's more than enough fantasy content to keep us genre geeks happy for weeks. There's mad-scientific romance ("Maybe It's Crazy"). There's Buffy ("Vampire Slayer Blues"). There's witchcraft ("Modern Mystic") and fairy-tale riddling ("I Am"). And then there's the title track, which brilliantly fuses ghost stories a la Supernatural, Happy Days rock-and-roll, and teens-and-their-cars cautionary country ballads into a rollicking jukebox classic.

It should be noted that this is emphatically not just a girl-and-guitar disc; one of its strongest features, in fact, is the layered intricacy of the material. "Fly Little Bird" and "Pretty Little Dead Girl" in particular have gorgeous harmonies going on, and "Sycamore Tree"'s multiple voices weave in and out and over each other to superb effect. This is all the more remarkable in an independent-release live album, and a debut album at that. There's no better lyricist working anywhere in (or out of) filkdom, and the performances are uniformly excellent.

Highly recommended. And be sure to keep an eye out for the studio album now in production....