Angela Desveaux – Wandering Eyes

It’s axiomatic that sincere love songs do not an indie rock record make, but Angela Desveaux is a contrarian. Wandering Eyes fearlessly explores ten ways you can trip, fall, break and mend in love, and even explain to a jealous friend that you’re not trying to steal her man.

The songs are mostly country-tinged pop, but gritty at their many edges. They weep with the pedal steel of fellow Canadian Jean-Guy Grenier and lope to the drumming of Howard Bilerman, formerly of Arcade Fire. “If Only” and “Make Up Your Mind” have the pace and tenor of the saddest country dusties, but “All The Talk” is loaded with pop jangle, and “Good Intentions” is pure pop in forward motion. Most of the songs fall somewhere between, easy to imagine either unplugged in a country dance hall or rocking out in the wee hours at a downtown nightclub.

Desveaux’s voice is hard to cast; it eddies and pools, sparkles and occasionally scrapes bottom, somewhere in the neighborhood of Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and Kasey Chambers. Her lyrics occasionally approach Jay Farrar territory in their inscrutability. In fact, Farrar’s music was among the influences that inspired her return to the bluegrass and country music she grew up with, in Nova Scotia. And when she decided she wanted Wandering Eyes to rock, she turned to Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt producer Brian Paulson to make her record.