Mary Lou Lord – Live City Sounds

Though people strumming guitars in a subway station can be pretty damn annoying, that’s not always the case. Such is the important lesson learned on this mostly-covers disc, Mary Lou Lord’s first full-length release since 1998’s Got No Shadow. Recorded in Boston’s Park Street subway station and Harvard Square, the album finds Lord tackling songs from artists such as Big Star, Sandy Denny and Daniel Johnston, all in the setting in which she seems most comfortable.

Lord’s fairly straight-forward renditions and simple vocal-and-guitar presentation may not immediately attract attention, but there’s plenty of warmth in her performances to carry the day. Lord has always excelled at covering songs that are not only good, but suit her easygoing vocal style. She continues that here, shifting between tunes both familiar (Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”) and overlooked (the Pogues’ “Sayonara”), subtly adding her own touches without detracting from what made the songs work in the first place.

Lord proves a particularly strong interpreter of Richard Thompson’s work, jangling through “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” and delicately rendering “Beeswing”. The few low points (most notably a languid version of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”) are redeemed by such numbers as her own “His Lamest Flame” and her take on the Magnetic Fields’s “I Don’t Want To Get Over You”.

If more subway performers sounded like Lord, maybe public transportation wouldn’t feel like such a hassle.