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"Love, Shelby"
When former country starlet Shelby Lynne
reinvented her musical persona on 2000's flawed but affecting
I Am Shelby Lynne, critics salivated and even the Grammys responded
with a belated Best New Artist trophy. The album's sound, somewhere
between classic Memphis grooves, gothic swamp music, and post-Brill
Building AM pop, was special enough that word of Lynne's studio
collaboration with hyper-commercial producer-songwriter Glen
Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band) set some minds
to worrying that her edge would be lost. They can stop fretting.
Love, Shelby is actually superior in some ways to its predecessor.
If anything, Lynne's writing and singing here are even more compelling.
Ballard's touch is limited mostly to stacks of electric and acoustic
guitars, which seem designed to slide the songs onto contemporary
radio, and the updated, hip-hop-shaded beats that power many
cuts. Lynne's concerns are front and center, whether in the vows
of emotional openness and resilience on "Wall in Your Heart,"
"Trust Me," and "I Can't Wait" or the intimations
of Southern soul on "Bend." John Lennon's "Mother"
becomes a sort of autobiography in her hands--her father killed
her mother in a murder-suicide when Lynne was a teenager--until
switching the song's perspective to her dad's in the final verse.
Her story gives the soaring "Killin' Kind" (previously
heard on the Bridget Jones's Diary soundtrack) a hint of ambivalence
about romantic surrender. A couple of cuts, most obviously "Jesus
on a Greyhound," succumb to the self-consciousness that
marred a couple of I Am ShelbyLynne's sketches, but that's a
minor complaint in the face of what this record's best has to
offer. --Rickey Wright |
