Lucid Culture

She fought the sound and

She won

She fought the sound and

She won

Carolyn AlRoy fought the PA all the way through her 45-minute set, didn’t break a sweat and ended up victorious. The only thing she couldn’t do was get the crowd out of their seats to gather in front of the stage, but her entreaties were a lost cause: everyone was too comfy in their seats enjoying the show. AlRoy is defined by three things. She’s an unusually terse lyricist, given to deceptively simple crystallizations. She’s also a hookmeister: like her cohort onstage tonight, Ninth House frontman Mark Sinnis, she knows that hits are simple. They stick in your brain: you can hum them. AlRoy proved tonight how adept she is at writing catchy tunes, particularly the sad but ultimately hopeful Goner, with its addictive chorus.

AlRoy also displayed a beautiful, regretful, longing vocal delivery. It’s a good hunch that most singer-songwriters are petrified to share the stage with someone who might conceivably steal their thunder, but not her. Bringing Sinnis up to sing harmonies was a stroke of genius, akin to listening to Lianne Smith and Mary Lee Kortes of Mary Lee’s Corvette raising the roof together at a couple of shows at Lakeside last year. AlRoy put Sinnis on her more romantic numbers, and watching the two of them grinningly nudge each other to new heights of subtlety and good humor was lots of fun. Sinnis can croon with anybody, and displayed an impressive range that he virtually never uses when singing his own material. His loverboy playing off AlRoy’s lovergirl was amusing to say the least: Peaches and Herb, eat your hearts out. The highlight of their duets was the old Johnny Cash/June Carter standard I Still Miss Someone, distinguished by an imaginative arrangement where AlRoy sang Johnny’s lead line and Sinnis sang in a low baritone underneath it.  

AlRoy mixed songs from her most recent cd Gorgeous Enormous in with a lot of new material. The most gripping new songs were the sad, resigned, countrypolitan hit Bad Habits -  a dead ringer for an Owen Bradley number from the Patsy Cline era – and the devastatingly funny Comic Book World, a bouncy, major-key autopsy of a relationship, spiced with completely over-the-top Freudian imagery. She also did a very simple upbeat major-key number that sounded a lot like something Donna Susan might write.

Happily, the sound returned to its usual excellent state for Linda Draper’s cd release show for her latest and fifth effort, Keepsake. Playing solo on acoustic guitar as she virtually always does, she fingerpicked with imagination and agility and made it look effortless. She still sings with the bell-like clarity of a chorister, which she once was, but she’s utilizing her lower register more and it suits her material. As a lyricist, Draper is unsurpassed. While her new material backs away from the intricate rhyme schemes and deliciously off-the-wall metrics that were all over her last couple of albums, she hasn’t lost the ability to deliver a knockout double or triple entendre. As much as her songs tend to be melancholy, she writes mostly in major keys, and serves them up with considerable humor, even on the haunting, ghostly Traces Of, from the new album. She’s also reverted to the catchy pop sensibility of her first album, as opposed to the hypnotic fingerpicking style that she’d been mining until recently: you can hum her stuff just as much as AlRoy’s. Despite this being Memorial Day weekend, the house was full, the audience was ecstatic and wouldn’t let her leave without an encore. A particularly good pairing of two songwriters at the top of their game.

Kat Heyman and her rhythm section opened the show with a soporific set of generically narcissistic, tuneless Lilith fare.