Amy Lavere – Anchors And Anvils

Memphis bassist and singer Amy Lavere’s 2005 debut This World Is Not My Home showed a promising touch with jazz swing and country boogie but was undercut by somewhat underdeveloped original material. Her second album makes substantial amends; there are only three originals this time, all of them solid.

The riveting opener “Killing Him” gets right all the keen, human details of a love turned toward darkness — “Love weighed on her heart like marble stone/Flash of a knife, he was gone” — and then transitions into a lovely waltz, “Tennessee Valentine”, that sounds like a country pop standard from Tennessee Ernie Ford. “Pointless Drinking” works the kind of sing-song country melody Elvis Costello favors, but with a lyric of warm unforced humor: “Will I ever unharden and stop showing my ass?/Will those eternal bartenders ever stop filling this half-empty glass?”

“Classic country gypsy jazz,” Lavere likes to call her approach, which is close enough for shorthand. Producer Jim Dickinson keeps the setting loose and live, like a mostly unplugged Beale Street session, and too rhythmically physical to feel scripted.

The album’s lone misstep, the funky “People Get Mad”, proves Lavere isn’t ready for the chitlin circuit. But Dickinson rarely pushes the styles beyond the limits Lavere’s voice, which is supple and youthful, with unaffected traces of Billie Holiday around the edges. When she closes with a smart, unstrained version of Dylan’s “I’ll Remember You”, it’s like hearing the song for the first, even finest time.