Various Artists – Edges From The Postcard2

A perennial dilemma in sports dictates that if you expand the league, you thin out the talent pool, and while you may add more fans to the base, you can wind up paying good money to see a pitcher who really isn’t ready yet for the major leagues.

In a rough way, this describes the downside of the burgeoning alternative country scene. On one hand, it’s marvelous that folks are taking up fiddles, accordions and mandolins to reinvent organic American music. On the other, the unprecedented low cost of making a CD and the trendiness of alt-country is nudging a lot of people into make records before they’ve got their chops together.

Nothing could exemplify both sides of this dime better than Edges From the Postcard 2, a 30-song anthology of artists connected to the annual Twangfest in St. Louis and to the Postcard2 alternative country internet discussion group. This cross-section of mostly Midwestern roots music serves up fine and exclusive performances by some of the strongest young country-folk acts around (Robbie Fulks, Kevin Johnson, Mike Ireland) and quite a few slabs of underdone steak.

Don’t get me wrong; the record’s strengths are many, but its shortcomings are more thought-provoking, because they’re pervasive in an otherwise exciting scene. For one thing, like so many bands I see out and about, some artists here are too keen to round out their sound with traditional instruments before they know how to really play them or record them. Bluetick’s “Broken Hearted Born” features mandolin and banjo that stomp all over each other and just muddy up the mix. And the fiddle on Roy Kasten’ s “Blue Island Illinois”, an otherwise beautiful song, is so timorous and indecisive that it ought not to be there at all.

Another problem is that some young rockers who’ve jumped excitedly into country music don’t understand that the closer you get to the stock country subject matter of love, drinking and hell-raising, it gets harder, not easier, to pen something worth listening too. That’s why on Edges, cuts that venture into more personal and poignant realms, like Kasten’s, or Belle Starr’s “Nobody You’d Know”, are far more successful than tracks from honky-tonk central casting such as Walter Clevenger’s “Only You”.

That said, I loved the Ghost Rockets’ “Under The Table” for its cleverness and deep groove. And Bill Lloyd ‘s country-pop “I Can’t Tell My Heart What To Do” is jangly and harmony-drenched with a stellar pedal steel break. Still other songs, such as Quick and Dirty’s “Smoke Rings”, come deliciously close to country perfection but are undermined by their weak structure, which seems either mired in a misunderstanding of how traditional songs are shaped or in an experimental departure from form that only got halfway there.

The biggest deficit by far, virtually across the board, is the singing. Strip away everything else, and if a country song isn’t built around a strong, distinctive voice, it just dies. While it’s a bit unfair to generalize about artists from a single song, I hear little but twangy, nasal affectation from groups such as Fear and Whiskey and The Sovines. Elana Skye attempts a honky-tonk song (“Biggest Piece Of Nothing”) with pipes thinner than a Dixie straw, and it’s not pretty.

In a better world, many of these cuts would be demos for top-flight singers who could take them into the country mainstream. Indeed, the songs are uniformly better than the team-written product on country radio; it’s many of the performances on Postcards that aren’t worth writing home about.