Review Summary: Even cowgirls get the neon blues
It’s a sad feature of the current internet brain poisoned culture that’s been hoisted upon us by Big Tech that sincerity is often viewed as something to be avoided or mocked. Earnestness is cringe; honest expression without ironic distance is for losers. Be cool at every turn, because you never know who could be recording, and worse, who could be watching. It’s exhausting even thinking about. It’s this backdrop that makes Charlie Marie’s latest album
Signs such a great record for the moment.
The charm of this album lies precisely in its ability to lean into or perhaps completely ignore any sense of the aforementioned neurotoxicity.
Signs is a flat-out honest and plainly worded confrontation and reckoning with loss in all areas of Marie’s life – romantic, plutonic, ecological and familial – by way of a 2022 open-ended road trip. It engenders the same warm-heartedness listening to as a good friend recounting their life-changing travels would. And that’s no small feat.
Take for instance the straightforward cuts “Namaste” and “Montana” where Marie sings about working through a nasty breakup. We’ve heard the words and the phrases before, but they’re sung with such conviction that it’s like hearing it all again for the first time. Or odes to the open road found in “Ponderosa Pine” and “Kancamagus Highway” that make lines like ‘We’ve only got today’ feel like truly hard-earned advice.
The music follows a similarly quality trajectory. Mostly built from neotraditional and retro stylings with 60s psychedelic and western flairs, most noticeable in the dramatic “Keleena,” it all works perfectly to provide a platform for Marie’s steady, twangy midrange voice.
All this conspires to make
Signs an overwhelmingly charming album in my book. Marie’s previous album
Ramble On is also quite enjoyable and well made, but a bit more of a standard neotraditional outing. The turns of phrase are slicker, the music perhaps a bit more polished and modern. But the confessionally raw, stream-of-consciousness quality of the songwriting on
Signs feels much more earnest and unfiltered, and it’s all the stronger for it. Maybe we could all use a bit more of that.
