Song, by Toad

It’s difficult to describe this album without sounding at best a little blasé and at worst dismissive, but believe me that is not my intention. The problem is that the sound occupies such entirely familiar territory, especially for my regular readers, that it would be easy to say ‘ah yes, another one of those albums’.

Imagine a lounge jazz songstress with splashes of country and blues, a luscious voice and a tendency to sneak a little cabaret macabre in there from time to time. Yep, told you so, I’ve talked about a hundred of these albums before. The Tom Waits influence is slapped on the table early on (pianist Linford Detweiler sounds like he could actually be a Tom Waits character, no disrespect intended) with Don’t Wait for Tom, a clattering homage* to the great man. It is liberally sprinkled with either direct quotes or paraphrases from his own songs and, most tellingly, that gorgeous spiralling clarinet that this particular genre uses to such great effect.

It’s odd actually because after that songs two and three are much more country influenced and really nothing like as good, for my money, so I can imagine tuning out a little at this stage, but Trouble, I’m on a Roll and Nothing is Innocent are superb. Ultimately it may be an easy pigeonhole, but it’s a really good example of a style of music I tend to like an awful lot, and I really would recommend this album. It’s not brilliant all the way through, but it’s better than 90% of its neighbours in this particular part of the musical landscape.

Over the Rhine – Don’t Wait For Tom
Over the Rhine – Trouble

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*If any – any – of you pronounce this “o’marge” I swear to god I am going to find a cute little kitten and stamp on its head. It’s fucking “hommidge“. Look it the fuck up if you think I’m wrong – dictionary.com, Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary (click ’show phonetics’). O-fucking-marge for fuck’s sake. That come from the artistic community over-emphasising the Frenchness to sound more sophisticated and we have all picked up on it and sets my teeth right fucking on edge, so it does. Yeuch.