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The unfairness of things (7): Sometymes Why

This occasional series of digressions ordinarily focuses on releases which, for any number of reasons, are too peripheral or too eccentric or just too out of luck to be reviewed in the pages of No Depression. In the case of Sometymes Why, the album came out two years ago and only ended up in my hands a couple months back. They've changed the spelling of the name to accommodate a pre-existing ensemble; the lovely letterpress cover (courtesy Portland's Stumptown shop) reads Sometimes Why, but that's not the point.

The point is that this is a wonderfully casual collaboration between Kristin Andreassen (principally a member of Uncle Earl), Ruth Ungar (mostly a Mammal), and Aoife O'Donovan (lead singer of Crooked Still). According to Amazon it's expensively out of print; according to the band's website, they're on tour in Ireland next month, and they'll all be around Merlefest (the MySpace blog promises they'll pull something together there, and I'm going to hope that Peter and Lisa manage to lure them to play at the ND booth).

The unfairness, in this case, has to do with the abundance of talent on display here and in their primary enterprises. This little knock-off of an album is filled with gentle charms, and the warmth of singers who really enjoy singing together. The show-stopper, I suppose, is "Too Repressed," a wonderfully direct and ribald commentary on...OK, it's about sex (or, rather, the unfulfilled need for sex)...but beyond the disarming frankness of the lyrics is a knowing and very smart song which captures something of the conundrum I suspect young women face today. It is a funny song to hear as a middle-aged man with a four-year-old daughter, and I have puzzled some over how I would feel if and when Maggie voices these sentiments. Anything I might type in this sentence would (a) be wrong and (b) prove to be a sentiment I might be incapable of living up to.

All that said, Somytimes Why is a charming record, both light ("I'm Trying To Remember What City I Know You From") and beautiful ("Hush Child"), and these are three of the best voices you'll hear together (or apart). Peter e-mailed late last night to suggest I take a listen (online; the horrors!) to Tao Rodriguez-Seeger's side venture, The Anarchist Orchestra. He, too, is a Mammal, and I am struck by how incredibly vibrant this whole world of string-band/bluegrass/acoustic musicians is right now. By how much good music they make, by how easily they move from setting to setting. By how lucky we are to enjoy this renaissance.

Nothing unfair about that, eh?

Posted by grant on April 24, 2007 9:56 AM | Permalink

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