For all its panoramic sweep, breathtaking colors and endless sky, as captured in music by Calexico and Giant Sand, the Sonoran desert can kill you lots of ways, and Tucson resident Cathy Rivers’ debut CD, Bleached, puts those right out front. Residents of Dead End, Anywhere, USA will immediately recognize in her music the parched bones of their dreams and the near-suffocating heat of their will to escape.
Produced by fellow Tucsonan Teddy Morgan, Bleached is littered like an abandoned mining town with broken bottles — relationships, fantasies of relationships, loss of innocence and self-knowledge. Rivers’ voice is melodic and believable through the ballads, many arranged with a southwestern bent.
She soars, though, in the rockin’ “Twister”, which breaks wide open into hyper-charged punk “like a twister through the trailer park.” And she punks up the trad-country of Morgan’s two-steppin’ “You Break My Heart Every Time”, a duet with peerless nouveau Bakersfield crooner, Troy Olson. “Rain Song”, co-written with Morgan, lopes and lunges through a punk-pop duet chorus, and a bridge that says it all about why Rivers abides this dry gulch town: “My roots are deep where the lightning never sleeps/And the sky won’t let loose of the stars.”
