The war against silence:  Failer and any ongoing attempt to segregate music by age is going to have to figure out what to do with twenty-three-year-old canadian alternative-country singer kathleen edwards, who sounds like a younger lucinda williams only until you pay enough attention to the lyrics to wonder which direction the age-difference goes, and like an alternative-country singer only until you notice that somehow alt.country has become the only genre in which you're still allowed to use the mannerisms that used to belong to rock until rock got new gadgets. edwards shares management and label with sarah harmer, and some of each of their photographs look like shots of the other one, but i'll assume the business intersections aren't simply artwork efficiencies. and although a common genre could be circumscribed around sarah and kathleen's styles if that were some kind of rodeo event, failer is much more of a rock album than you were here, most of these songs done with five- or six-piece bands and spiked with tiny flourishes that owe as much to thin lizzy or the replacements as to gillian welch or stina nordenstam. "six o'clock news" intertwines twanging electric hooks, wiry banjo and double-time tambourine rustle. the faintly linda thompson-like "one more song the radio won't like" is oddly becalmed, and might have been funnier if it had been harder to see the radio's point. the atmospheric "hockey skates" reminds me of cheryl wheeler's "driving home" and of dire straits again. 'The lone wolf" might be a relocation of suzanne vega's "ironbound" from a city schoolyard into the wolf's unfenced countryside. "12 bellevue" and "maria" both veer towards maria mckee's life is sweet squall, but the elegiac "mercury" sounds quite vividly like sarah harmer (and maybe a little more like sarah's old band, weeping tile, than most of you were here did). the music for "westby" is effervescent, but kathleen sings wheezily over it, deflating much of the fizz, and on "national steel" she plays her own string section, but never quite lets the song gain any momentum. but "sweet little duck", the finale, is a lullaby bracingly reduced to little but kathleen's acoustic guitar, her double-tracked voice, and a few washes of pedal-steel ambience. if the "younger" in the lucinda williams comparison has any descriptive function for the music, it's probably that kathleen still sings and writes more unsteadily than lucinda, and failer thus retains some of the excitement of uncertainty that the more confident car wheels on a gravel road and essence have outgrown. if kathleen gets to make more records, she'll need more than naiveté to distinguish them. so it may help that she's already a stunningly good lyrical storyteller. if this same album of music had had factory-issue lyrics, it might easily have passed for alt.country's answer to norah jones (and, marketwise, still might), and i wouldn't know how to predict whether kathleen was really ready for a career of this. but the lyrics (which are not in the booklet, but available on her web site) are worth reading even if the music seems like anathema to you. "six o'clock news" follows a short police stand-off, like a rewrite of richard thompson's "1952 vincent black lightning" in which the action doesn't take place off-screen, and into five short verses packs a lover's troubled history, the tableau, the police, the woman's dreams and the end, and i think we can be sure kathleen knows what she's doing from the mere fact that she repeats the tender "peter, sweet baby" late enough in the song for it to be shocking. "hockey skates" is as bleak as relationship surrenders get, but the tired couplet "i am tired of playing defense / and i don't even have hockey skates" is both a lyricist's brilliant conversational insight and the narrator's surprisingly cogent attempt to reformulate her dissatisfaction into her audience's vocabulary. "lone wolf" shows how lost a real-life storyteller can get in an extended metaphor, and except for one exasperated line "12 bellevue" can't figure out how to draw faceless characters, but the spare "mercury" (in its entirety: "wanna go get high? / mercury is parked outside under the light. / wanna take me to / the parking lot of the old high school? / and it's like you said, / i would've turned up dead in the car.") knows exactly who both of its people are. "westby" is the provocative one, about a motel affair with an older married man, but the best touch, to me, is the deliberately obtuse line-end word-repetition in "if you weren't so old i'd tell my friends, / but i don't think your wife would like my friends", at once a bad formal decision and a moment of character clarity. there's not much to the break-up/bug-out rave "maria", but "i want my bubble car", in the middle of a sand-blasted country-rock blare, is a little glittering smile. "national steel" wanders in unmarked territory until suddenly considering the exact financial implications of 'trading a daughter and two thousand dollars / for a national steel". and "sweet little duck", the finale, walks familiarly dissatisfied paths right up until she says "and on tuesday i'll be back for my things", before setting out for an unexplained job "down south", and i'm suddenly gripped by a vision of all these heart-broken, bubble-car-less people limping south down the edge of the same road where the ghosts of the people who didn't escape in "fast car" are driving north. it could be any road, i guess, or every one, and maybe i finally understand why we have so much traffic. every lost soul thinks distance will change something. glenn mcdonald furia.com				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews