Shannon Stephens - The Breadwinner [Album]

Asthmatic Kitty

September 23, 2009, 10:26 PM

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Music needs to be built up of different elements and layers. They all need to gel together as one. It's no good having incisive, telling, poetic lyricism if the rest of the package is just mediocre. Or worse, dull.

This Shannon Stevens album The Breadwinner is the new growth of a recording career that has lain dormant for six years. Shannon had an album and EP way back at the turn of the century and has been doing the domestic thing since. She has also got a little history with a band named Marzuki, notable only because Sufjan Stevens (no relation) was part of that too.

This is softly sung folk; much of it feels like just voice and acoustic jumbo guitar even when there's actually more in the mix. Shannon's signature is a single note, hung and held across what feels like half a verse. It's a wide paint brush, well loaded, smoothing on a two inch stripe of sound.

If not quite dull, it is certainly a hushed pleasure. The Asthmatic Kitty blurb tells us that Shannon lives at home with her young daughter, and cooks the same meals over and over again. That's like trying to spin magic out of just what the whole world does. Please Kitty people come up with better blurb next time? The first track 'More To Speak Of' is pleasant but just so unremarkable. Sorry.

The next, 'Hard Times Are Coming' is the one that starts with chicken noises that made me put down my own paint brush just for a moment. When Shannon tells us how to make our own bread and how to coax survival out of the land, then I'm sure it was meant as a lovely idea, but I just had visions of going backwards in the worst kind of way. In any event, I fear for that chicken. Musically the track lifts a bit but it's all just too twee and earnest. The arrangement on this is 'skewed lounge act ', syncopated jazzy brush drumming adding to the general feel. It was somehow uncomfortable, and it shouldn't have been. Or maybe it should have been much more uncomfortable. When there is doubt, apply counter-intuition.

The next two - 'The One Who Sees Me' and 'In The Summer In The Heat' - on one level, they are pleasant. On another they plod along like a donkey. I've given it three or four runs through, I've applied my own logic and it hasn't helped. They still plod.

Shannon's vocals are too smooth. That's what is supposed to mark out great folk singers from backing trios, isn't it? An idiosyncratic character is just not present, and she has a distinct lack of it. She needs a few years of rough living, not nicely chilled out time on the farm with the kid.

'Come To My Table (Dine With Me)' is pure at heart but is just cloying. Actually, by the fourth time of listening I realised that there's actually a bit of story of domestic struggle in here, it's not quite the boring song of complacency that is first portrayed. It's the minor struggle of anyone newly grown up, young adults but now with kids. At times life is wonderful and at times a pinch. A tiny bit of interest but did I mention cloying?

'The Most Delicious Hours' is half starting to get there, a bit of grit in the sound to lift it from the feeling that this would be ideal as uncomfortable background noise. 'Song Of The Breadwinner' - is sadly self congratulatory about the joys of being up early, working and earning. Which is a loss because musically it's probably the most interesting track, thanks to the touches of brass and piano to lift it from the clay furrow.

The remainder of the record feels like that; a remainder. 'The Dream' tells the listener "You'll be making more next year" (money that is) whilst we have slightly menacing melancholy minor chords from strings, warning about indulgence and debt, falling prey to 'the greedy'. It's not convincing.

Sadly, this is music to play at a dinner party where your guests don't much enjoy music and certainly don't want any challenge.

Tracklisting:
1. More To Speak Of
2. Hard Times Are Coming
3. The One Who Sees Me
4. In Summer in the Heat
5. Come To My Table
6. The Most Delicious Hours
7. Song of the Breadwinner
8. The Dream
9. Poor Man's Part
10. Seems I'm Never Tired Lovin' You

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