Review Summary: Brandi Carlile shows potential on an album that saitsfies vocally, but has some rough patches song-wise.
Walking the depressingly clean sidewalks of Rutland, Vermont one evening, I take a moment to reflect on this desolate state. Compared to my home in New York, Vermont is the land where time stands still. It's a wasteland of cows, open areas, and roads that lead to towns with 4 houses and one street. I look to my right and see a bumper sticker pasted to a used bookshop window that reads
"Vermont: Where the Party Never Ends Because It Never Began", and I can't help but sardonically chuckle to myself. Nothing ever seems to happen here, I think to myself. And then I recall one shining moment in my history with this state, when things were different.
I was introduced to Brandi Carlile in a tiny Vermont theater with a thousand screaming lesbians, five-hundred bearded hicks, and at least twenty-five mixes of the two. Dragged to the Paramount by my elder sister, I wasn't expecting much from this concert. Brandi was opening for the legendary Indigo Girls, who I personally despised despite tons of familial approval. Everything seemed set up for another slow moving Vermont night, and I sulked into a state of typical angsty teenage apathy. But then the lights dimmed and out walked a small but confident looking brunette haired woman with a denim jacket and a barefooted cello player, and without a word of introduction, she began finger-picking this sad little phrase on an old run down guitar. I couldn't tell you the name of the song she was playing now, but I can tell you this: She was mesmerizing. Her voice was powerful, a stellar blend of hard-knocks-country-female wisdom and a young woman's delicacy, and it echoed through the small Roosevelt-era theater with a omnipotent resonance. In spite of several years’ worth of conditioned cynicism, I couldn't help but grin. The rest of her set was fantastic, a perfect mixture between toe tapping crowd pleasers and heart-warming ballads, capped off by two astounding covers, a crowd-interactive version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”, and a truly faithful, chilling version of the Jeff Buckley “Hallelujah”. As she left the stage, to my surprise I joined my family, the lesbians, the rednecks, and the question marks in a standing ovation, thoroughly entertained by a fantastic show.
Thus, Carlile’s second album,
The Story is something of a minor disappointment to me. Though still driven by Carlile’s marvelous voice,
The Story substitutes the stripped down acoustic feel of Carlile’s live show with the trappings of mainstream pop rock; Simple “rock” drumming and harmonies out the wazoo replace gorgeous cello and the sweet girl-with-guitar atmosphere Carlile creates in person. Her lead single “The Story” has Carlile singing
“All of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am” with a fatigued quality over radio-friendly instrumentation, whereas live Carlile drives the track with emotion as her backing band, twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth, lock in with their acoustic bass and guitar to subtly make the track intricate without taking the focus off of Brandi. Her voice is brilliant, and thankfully Elvis Costello producer T Bone Burnett doesn’t try to mask her human mistakes; her voice cracks as she belts the final chorus. Throughout the album, it’s Carlile’s show, and vocally she makes the best of it, dynamically using her voice to display the varying levels of emotion of Carlile’s story. Late album ballad “Cannonball” angelically swoons with a wear as she sighs
“There's a man all alone Telling me his friends are gone, That they've died and flown away. So I told him he was wrong, that your friends are never gone if you look to the sky and pray”, whereas the album’s opening track “Late Morning Lullaby” shows Carlile using her voice for the exact opposite purpose, as she plows through a chorus of
“Only Beautiful Eyes Lie, Only Beautiful Eyes Cry” with a substantial amount of passion. Carlile's voice is a force to be reckoned with, and on
The Story, she exercises her gift to its fullest potential.
In essence there’s nothing outright wrong with
The Story. If it weren’t for the fact that it feels as though it’s all been done before,
The Story would be a real standout amongst the folk community. That being said, the album’s sound isn’t much different than any other solid female folk artist. It’s consistently soft (and because of it, slow moving at times), and lyrically it treads the familiar “I’m a woman who’s seen a lot from past relationships and life” ground, save for a few tracks.
The Story is Carlile’s autobiography in many ways, but tracks that are too introspective fail at bringing the listener with them and come off sounding trite, such as “My Song” and “Wasted”. Both tracks are vehicles for Carlile’s sorrow about life, but are both too bland instrumentally to make them sound like nothing more than filler tracks. It’s disappointing when the songs dip into such an admittedly hokey rut like the tired-sounding “Have You Ever”, which lyrically deals with celebrating the good things you just can't miss because they're too special. The stab at upbeat lyrics and music misses completely, especially when compared to how powerful her sadder songs are.
As the album comes to a close, a flash of that brilliance that made me love Brandi Carlile returns for a brief savory moment.
“Broken sticks and broken stones/Will turn to dust just like our bones,” sings Carlile over a sweet Irish cello (it appears!), and for this song, I feel as though I’m back at the Paramount, discovering Brandi all over again. “Again Today” strips all the extra crap
The Story throws on to Brandi Carlile and she sounds like a human again, not a radio staple. The songs on
The Story are nice, the potential is there. Her lyrics, when good, are fantastic. Her poetry is heart breaking at times. Reading the words of “Again Today” on a sheet of paper makes you lament that some artists really do suck at writing lyrics. In fact the only thing stopping Brandi Carlile from being an elite songstress is whatever makes her turn her excellently crafted acoustic gems into generic won’t-say-cookie-cutter pop folk music.
“I'm afraid to sink, I'm afraid to swim” she sighs on the album’s final track. If she just decides to "swim" and go all in and make what she’s really capable of, look out for Brandi Carlile.
Recommended Tracks
Cannonball
Again Today
The Story
