This week:
A steely Magnolia and a dusty 'Bama diva

Comment
on this story

Aimee Mann
Magnolia (Music from the Motion Picture) (Reprise)

Okay, this isn't exactly the new Aimee Mann album. Only nine of the 13 tracks are by her, and of those, one is a cover, one is an instrumental version of a song from her last album, and one was on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack. Still, as a showcase for the critic's darling and record-company-abuse poster child, it's effective and surprisingly coherent.

In the liner notes, Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson claims he originally conceived his marvelously messy film as "an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs," and it makes sense. The movie is stocked with the same kind of characters who inhabit Mann's territory: hurt and hurtful, checkered with emotional scars, seeking solace and forgiveness. Mann is still working with the same Prozac-pop elements she's been refining since her 'Til Tuesday days (her only Top 40 hit, remember, was the domestic violence lullaby "Voices Carry"). But she has pared down her approach; the words are starker, the melodies more succinct. Even her voice, always a gentle instrument, relies largely on suggestion. You feel the weariness more than you hear it. As always, the songs are deceptively limpid, deeper than they look. At first go-round, the bouncy "Momentum" glides along so tunefully you don't even notice Mann blurting out, "I'm condemning the future to death so it can match the past." And "Wise Up" sounds like a hymn to maturity until the final line: "So just give up."

It's advice Mann might have taken herself after her bad luck in the recording industry (detailed in a New York Times Magazine story last year). Even if it's not the full-fledged return she deserves—the four non-Mann tracks seem incongruous and irrelevant—Magnolia at least makes you thankful for her perseverance.

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

Shelby Lynne

I Am Shelby Lynne (Island)

You can hear the South when Shelby Lynne sings—it's right there in the way she drawls "cain't" and "Los Angeleeeze," right there in the Southern-fried production backing her up. If you listen close to the Alabama native's much-hyped new album, I Am Shelby Lynne, however, you can also hear the sound of a less sunny clime: Great Britain. The kind of groove-oriented soul-pop found on I Am has been a specialty there since the late '60s, when Dusty Springfield got a new lease on life from a passel of Southern studio musicians. But in fact, I Am's beat-savvy strains and elliptical lyrics have even more in common with recent albums from U.K. chill-out queens Beth Orton and Dot Allison than Dusty in Memphis.

What Lynne has over her contemporary British sisters-in-arms is a rangy, smoky-barbecued voice that doesn't fit neatly into standard pigeonholes (and doubtless helped keep her on the Nashville sidelines for most of the '90s). With the exception of the blaring, Phil Spector-ish opener "Your Lies," Sheryl Crow producer Bill Bottrell custom-builds I Am Shelby Lynne around those red-clay pipes from a grab bag of old-school Southern musical flavors: roadhouse stomps and claps, supple Muscle Shoals soul comping, sisterly back-up vocals, and gorgeous lazy-day strings. The sound is old-school, perhaps, but not old-fashioned, as a drum machine marks time on over half the songs.

It's the contemporary beat-consciousness that makes the Orton/Allison connection explicit. Lynne wrote or co-wrote every song here, from the upbeat hand-waver "Gotta Get Back" to the desolate closer "Black Light Blue," and the album's strains of heartbreak and wry humor play to the strengths of her aching voice. But while the weary "Lookin' Up" ("for the next thing that brings me down") and "Where I'm From," a hymn to her home state, are great songs, the rest are merely decent songs made to sound great by the way Lynne's voice cozies into Bottrell's atavistic grooves—like Orton or Allison, she gets over more on atmosphere than on sharp writing. Still, I Am Shelby Lynne represents the coming out of a New-South belle of considerable downhome charm.

—Lee Gardner

February 24, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 8
© 2000 Metro Pulse