mary lorson & the soubrettes: burnbabyburn

Since the demise of Madder Rose in 1999, Mary Lorson has recorded under various guises (most notably Saint Low), scored numerous films and documentaries, beaten breast cancer twice, taken up teaching at a high school and started work on a semi-autobiographical novel.

She has also penned an original play about early twentieth century vaudeville star Eva Tanguay, sometimes purported to be “pop music’s first rock star”, and it was partly as a musical conduit for this project that Mary Lorson & The Soubrettes were formed. Completed by real-life couple Leah Houghtaling (banjo, tenor guitar and backing vocals) and Amelia Sauter (upright bass), it’s Lorson’s most pared-back band yet, and BurnBabyBurn neatly divides into songs that Lorson has played out for years and songs belonging to the Tanguay project – including a cover of Tanguay’s only existing recorded song, the defiant yet fun-infused ‘I Don’t Care’.

There is a hint of music hall to be found in the waltz-time ‘Bubble Of Pretend’, but more often the songs possess a homespun country-folk feel. Banjo is used to gentle and comforting effect pretty much throughout, and ‘BurnBabyBurn’ and ‘Crystal Ball’ – the two most traditionally ‘country’ tracks – both feature pedal steel. Lorson’s piano playing also lends a feel of gentle, organic musicianship to the album, most notably on the standout ‘These Police’, where it is elegiac and softly anthemic, but also on songs like ‘Busboy’ and ‘Only One Number Two’.

This is frequently at odds with the apparent lyrical themes, which can err towards the negative or pessimistic. Behind their sweet tunes, tracks often tell a melancholy tale; witness “Don’t bother with the stop signs, there’s no-one left” (‘Busboy’), “Under the wedding dress, a lonely heart was beating” (‘Mancub’), and the evocative, disturbing (and possibly Tanguay inspired) “Underneath the tressle table she meets the pervert’s eye / another unbecoming uniform clings to her thigh” (‘These Police’). Elsewhere the seamier side of life is alluded to also in ‘Let ‘Em Eat Little Debbie Cakes’, when Lorson sings that “…somebody’s daughter is topless tonight.”

Lorson’s vocal is some distance away from the narcotic languor of its Madder Rose years. Sweet, simple and relatively undemonstrative in delivery, it occasionally stretches for notes that sound just a little too high for her natural register, noticeably so on ‘BurnBabyBurn’. Sometimes, too, there is a tendency for songs to simply meander. ‘River’ and ‘Only One Number Two’ all feel slightly inconsequential, lacking development in a way that can be frustrating. The ambivalence of the lyrics to the latter reflects this also, with its (deliberately) half-hearted declaration that “It doesn’t matter / but yes it does.”

It will be interesting to see how these pieces slot into place as accompaniment to Lorson’s play; perhaps then the music will make more complete sense. As it stands though, despite its undoubted high points, BurnBabyBurn only partially succeeds on its own merits.

[MLS; February 6, 2012]

Written by: Jude Clarke

Tags: madder rose, mary lorson, mary lorson and the soubrettes, saint low

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 8:59 am and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.