Pros: "A Good Start" is a quintessential summer hit out of its time.
Cons: Rap does not become her.
The Bottom Line: In which the author imagines an alternate universe in which he had the courage to ask the prom queen out on a date... and she says, "mmm... maybe."
plorentz's Full Review: Lynn Teeter Flower by Maria Taylor
It's hard to deny that Maria Taylor has one of the prettiest voices you're likely to hear on an indie rock record these days. But, at least on record, there's always something a little off-putting about the singer, formerly half of the pretty-voiced southern gothic duo Azure Ray. Her voice is always recorded as if her face is only inches from the listener's. But, strangely, where we might expect to feel the human warmth of her breath, and the resonance of her voice in the air around us, there's actually an icy inaccessibility to it. Sorta like visiting someone in jail (speaking from recent experience), and you go into a tight, little, fluorescent-lit closet of a room, and while there's not much space between your face and theirs, there are two thick panes of glass between you, and you talk to each other on a phone, and you hear your own voices echoing themselves claustrophobically as the two of you talk.
As soft and intimate as her songs can be, there's an enforced distance between audience and listener. And it gives her records, intentionally or not, a forbidding quality, which, if her songs weren't as strong, might preclude listeners from caring. It was nearly three weeks after I'd purchased her sophomore solo album Lynn Teeter Flower before I actually had the nerve to listen to it. Never mind that as a paying customer, I was the one with the authority (since abdicated) to reject her (off to the used CD store with you!), I faced the prospect of listening to this new CD with all the apprehension of the nerd who wants to ask the prom queen out for a night at the drive-in. I braced myself for a steely-voiced, glassy-eyed put-down. And in the first few lines of the opening track "A Good Start", she justifies that apprehension, singing with icy clarity over nothing but a few sterile, shifting harmonium chords.
But then suddenly, a stark rock beat kicks in over that harmonium, and then along comes a punky, funky bassline, and some electric piano chords that sound like they were stolen from an old Greg Kihn record, and before I know it, I'm singing along with what, in another decade, in an alternate universe, might just be that one totally ubiquitous summer pop hit, the one pouring out of the speakers of every car stopped at every city intersection, the song beating out of the speakers of the beaten-up boomboxes scattering a million bikinied-body-dotted beaches across the nation, the one that seems like everyone in the world is bobbing their heads to and singing along with. Songs like that are barely even possible these days, but "A Good Start" gives me hope - and whatever anxieties I might have had about a new Maria Taylor record are blown away like so many dandelion helicopters.
Taylor must understand, on some level, the effect her voice has on guys like me. Her solo debut (2005's 11:11) and even her work with Azure Ray all has a standoffishness that comes across more chilly than beguiling, as if she (and her Azure Ray partner Orenda Fink) had developed are hard, nearly impenetrable sonic exoskeleton to protect whatever vulnerability their songs might reveal. These were hard records to break into, and, as uniformly pretty as they are, they're hard records to return to. And as inviting, as giddy-making an opener as "A Good Start" (apt title!) is, much of Lynn Teeter Flower retreats to that emphatically unintimate intimacy that marks so much of her previous work. Only, this time around, Taylor seems to understand better how to manipulate that emotional distance - as on "My Own Fault", or "Smile and Wave", a smirking collection of comparative self-deprecations sung over a cartoonish, Jon Brion-ish carousel ride - like a junior indie version of Aimee Mann.
On songs like "No Stars", she seems to go out of her way to remind us that she can, in fact, rock out, and that she is, in fact, unafraid of either a good, firm beat or a little heavy metal guitar (although hearing "Irish Goodbye", one wishes she might have been a little less fearless about incorporating hip-hop into the act), and these moments lend a refreshing counterpoint to her more confessional moments that makes them all feel just a little less precious. "Clean Getaway" is a simply written, acoustic, guitar-and-voice confessional (over the sounds of a steady rain, no less) about both the loneliness and liberation of that first apartment away from home that might have been insufferable elsewhere, but here is quite touching, earning no small amount of our empathy. Likewise, the painfully hesitant, doubtful, stop-start chorus of "A Small Part of Me" is positively devastating in the more varied, and more generally upbeat company of this collection of songs.
Part of what makes Maria Taylor so special among similar-sounding singer-songwriters is her general refusal to court her listeners. We usually have to go more than half way to meet her, and as comparatively approachable as Lynn Teeter Flower is, it only goes so far to dispel that aura of emotional distance. Her voice never cracks or quivers the way her friend and occasional collaborator Conor Oberst's does; and even her acoustic songs rarely have that gather 'round the campfire glow to them, opting more for something like a depressed 70s singer-songwriter pop nostalgia. This isn't the kind of record that's likely to generate a lot of cult-ish word of mouth hype; nor does it really seem to be the kind of record that will seep into your consciousness over time until, 10 or 20 years later, you think of it fondly, remembering the summer Robert Redford opened his movie theatre in Madison, and that long weekend you spent planting your first garden in the new house. I imagine that after listening to it a lot, I'll put it away. And maybe I'll forget about it for awhile. And then when I do finally put it back on, it will jolt me with its surprises again. A quietly astonishing little record.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Lynn Teeter Flower" by Maria Taylor
Saddle Creek Records
Released 3/6/07
Producers: Jim Eno, Andy LeMaster, Doug Easley, Maria Taylor
42 min.
SONGS: A Good Start - Clean Getaway - Smile and Wave - No Stars - Replay - Small Part of Me - Irish Goodbye - My Own Fault - The Ballad of Sean Foley - Lost Time - Lynn Teeter Flower
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