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Laura Cantrell - When The Roses Bloom Again |
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05 August 2005 |
Laura Cantrell When The Roses Bloom Again - (Diesel Only) The fact that she's based in New York might City might explain it. Raised as she was in the heart of music city, it's country roots awash in every street. Or the fact that she's a part-time radio host in East Orange, New Jersey spewing out old-time country classics while still trying to make it as a solo act. I don't know. But whatever the reason, Laura Cantrell's "When the Roses Bloom Again,' her second album proper and first for the New York indie label Diesel Only Records, is an exercise in musical hit and miss. Take the album's title track for instance, 'When the Roses Bloom Again.' It's is an old A.P. Carter composition that Laura came across when someone played it on her radio show and she fell instantly and madly in love. It's got that old-timey feel to it which you'd expect from a song written somewhere in the first half of the last century or so, but it's also got an almost haunting quality, of which it took something like her vocals to achieve. 'Oh So Many Years,' is another case in point. Originally recorded as a duet by Kitty Wells and Webb Pierce not to mention the Everly Brothers, Laura Cantrell really does have a voice that was meant for country music. The pedal steel on 'Don't Break the Heart' illuminates it to gorgeous effect as does the paired down acoustic of 'Mountain Fern,' a song born in the hills of Kentucky if ever there was one. But take that voice out of the backwoods of Kentucky or the hills of Tennessee and drape it over a more modern flavoured rocker or a mid-tempo pop recording and you've got yourself a problem. It doesn't work. The album's opening track is a prime example. 'Too Late For Tonight' is a breezy, up-tempo number that has more to do with mainstream pop than a voice like Cantrell's ought to know about. Same goes for 'All The Same To You.' It's too shaggy, almost danceable to be sharing the stage with some hardcore country magic. And there is some magic here. Especially in the Spanish flavoured 'Early Years,' the self-penned 'Broken Again,' and 'Yonder Comes a Freight Train,' a hillbilly classic in the making. All in all, not a bad second effort as long as she doesn't stray to far afield from classic country music. It's what she was born to play. 8.0 |