Laura Cantrell has a new electronic-only “EP” out and it’s fantastic. I put the term EP in quotes because, while it is the term Laura has chosen to apply to this release, it is actually long enough, at 34+ minutes, to qualify as an album. I guess it’s not an album because it is all covers, and includes some tracks that have been floating around for a while.
But it is great, simple, stripped down country music, perfectly adapted to her evocative and understated voice. Three tracks are highlights, the kind of tunes you would have built mix-tapes around back in the day. The greatest of all is her version of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” Now, recording 80s hits in in the idiom of very different musical genres is no longer a revolutionary gesture, given that there is a band out there that does nothing but record 80s music in Bossa Nova form, but this one is a stunner. I remember lying on my bed and listening closely to the lyrics when the New Order single came out, and being totally caught up in the bizarre sentimental tragedy being described. The song’s narrator comes home from the war only to witness his wife receiving a telegram informing her of his death. The lyrics were extremely out of place in a 80s club dance track, to put it mildly.
Laura Cantrell performs another dizzying act of estrangement with the song, but she does so by appropriating it to a genre (country weeper) and to a historical moment (an endless, tragic war) for which the song makes perfect sense: “you just can’t believe the joy I did receive/ when I got my leave.” She has made an excellent choice in actually keeping close to the original rhythmic structure of the song (although the arrangement has transformed the pulsing beat from dancey to ballad time, the beat is still emphatic).
Coupled with her compilation cover of “Sam Stone,” Laura has now recorded two of the most interesting war-themed songs during the Iraq debacle, both notable for being narrated by very sympathetic soldiers.
The other absolutely killer tracks here are the title tune, a Burt Bachrach number that also sounds utterly at home as a country standard, so much so that listening to Laura sing it made me forget where it came from and I had to go look it up, and one of my very favorite Merle Haggard songs, the picture-perfect composition “Silver Wings,” about a lover flying away on an airplane, that manages to sound both ultra-country and ultra modern despite being composed in the mid 70s.
There are many other great moments on the EP too, these are just the ones that stand out the most. If you download it, make sure to go over to Laura’s website and throw in some of the great free covers she has made available there, such as her (in my mind definitive) version of Elvis Costello’s “Indoor Fireworks.”
to recap:
Trains and Boats and Planes EP at Emusic
More free DLs at Lauracantrell.com
And listen to “Love Vigilantes” and “Trains and Boats and Planes” at her Myspace
Don Quixote Was a Steel Drivin' Man 