Marlee MacLeod’s third album, Vertigo, careens through an array of guitar-driven songs jammed with wry, sardonic lyrics, with deadpan delivery so engaging that you might overlook how good the music sounds.
Vertigo opens at full tilt with “Mata Hari Dress”, an anticipated clandestine meeting of two spies that would make a great movie plot. The next song, “Me and Shelley Winters”, is both poignant and funny as MacLeod asks for advice from the veteran actress during an imagined meeting on the F-train in Brooklyn and Winters imparts sensible wisdom to live by: “Look nonchalant and keep smiling” in the face of heartache. The title track (undoubtedly another nod to the movies) is propelled by MacLeod’s scrappy pop guitars and the laughter in her voice as she sings, “Take it easy, there you go, tiptoe around my delicate condition.”
A self-professed bookworm with an unpretentious Alabama twang, MacLeod scatters familiar phrases throughout the album and turns them upside down. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, but I’ve had it up to here,” she declares in “Econoline”, a bassy rocker marked by spare cello and acoustic guitar; “You’re a sight for your own sore eyes,” she mocks in the gently tweaking “Beautiful”. Still, some of the album’s most memorable moments are quieter numbers such as “When We Arrive” and “Like I Know What I’m Doing”, on which the wisecracking is dropped for hushed intensity and yearning.
“No Vacancy”, a wistful song about being on the road during the Christmas holidays written by MacLeod a month after her first tour, was originally recorded for a 1992 yuletide compilation album. She and the band re-recorded it during the making of Vertigo and included it as a bonus track at the end of the album. It’s a welcome addition, one of the most emotionally poignant songs MacLeod has ever written.
“It’s not so much the heights as it’s the edges,” the first line from the song “Vertigo”, pretty much sums the album. It’s the edges, catches and twists in MacLeod’s lyrics and voice, and the vulnerability that slips through the rocking guitars, that make this an engaging album.
