Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love
Archive
Posted On November 1, 2006
It feels like three very long years since the release of the Be Good Tanyas’ last album, the brilliant Chinatown. Upon reconvening after a hiatus, the trio of Frazey Ford, Trish Klein and Samanth Parton reputedly recorded many songs over the course of a year before settling on the thirteen that comprise Hello Love.
That preface seems significant in that this, their third full-length, feels more like a collection of songs than a cohesive album. Highlights abound, but there’s a sense of a band resuming work more so than building on the point at which we last left them. Some of that is due to the many sources for the material, which springs from at least six different wells: Ford and Parton each contribute originals; covers come from contemporaries, heroes and traditional vessels; and one track is a collaboration between all three members.
Not surprisingly, that last one, “Ootischenia”, is the quintessential Tanyas song here, an effortless groove accented by Klein’s banjo; Ford sings with growing urgency, her bandmates swelling and gelling in harmony behind her. Ford’s best writing comes in the slow-burning opener “Human Thing”, while she does a transformative turn on “Scattered Leaves”, written by Jeremy Lindsay of Chicago’s JT & the Clouds, lifting the emotional plane of his impressive lyrics and adding musical majesty that eclipses the original.
Parton’s “A Little Blues” finds the trio stepping lightly atop Old Crow Medicine Show’s old-timey stylings. But her piano ballad “Song For R” is the album’s absolute killer, a plaintive addict’s tale sung hushed and solo with palpable fragility.
Elsewhere there’s a brave tackling of Neil Young’s “For The Turnstiles”, which resonates without matching the darkness of the author’s version, and the album ends with a not-very-hidden final cover, Prince’s “When Doves Cry”. It seems an adventurous pick but winds up sounding, well, like what you’d expect the Be Good Tanyas doing Prince to sound like. Ford doesn’t make the intimate connection the lyrics demand to be taken seriously, and it is her most affected vocal on the album. Perhaps the Tanyas could have gone deeper inside the song by slowing down the tempo as they’ve done so masterfully with another cover, “That’s How Strong My Love Is”, in their live sets.
