- Autumn de Wilde
- Secret Sisters
One of the most off-putting elements of what’s usually dubbed Americana music is the self-awareness of many artists plying their trade to one particular sound or another that ceased to have any contemporary resonance five, six, or seven decades ago. Embracing that sound often involves bald imitation if not a game of dress-up. On the surface Alabama’s Secret Sisters fit that description to a T: the cover of their new album, Put Your Needle Down (Republic), looks like a relic of the late 30s, with Laura and Lydia Rogers dressed like a couple of dust-bowl ingenues gate-crashing a funeral, in vintage black dresses, posing in front of an old buggy. In “Iuka” the narrator reports from beyond the grave that her abusive father murdered her and her lover when they tried to elope, and even though the Rodgerses didn’t write “The Pocket Knife,” which was penned by PJ Harvey and originally turned up on her 2004 album Uh Huh Her, the message of a girl protesting a forced marriage has the feel of an old-timey classic. There’s an undeniable drama in such artifice, and it suits the Secret Sisters well.
She recorded the new record with her husband and bassist Jesse Newport, and gone are any traces of Americana in favor of a strange mix of 70s hard rock (I keep waiting for the arpeggio that ripples through “I Wanna Love You” to give way to the infamous cowbell of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”) and doom-metal guitar. There’s part of me that admires the disconnect between her cooed voice and the lumbering grooves, but that doesn’t mean it works. I still find her delicate, somewhat somnambulant voice appealing, but at the same time I find it increasingly hard to trust anything that it expresses—as it all comes out flat, with virtually no inflection. Below you can check out the sludgy opening track, “Oblivious.” She plays the Empty Bottle on Friday.
