As Let's Just Stay Here spins, listeners find themselves being treated to the results of the perfect kind of marriage – the sort that starts with something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. It's a beautiful affair, but what makes it so? What's old: a faded, glorious landscape with lonesome, reverb-touched and dust-swept guitars and Carolyn Mark's own trad country and breathless vocalese. What's new: the timing and delivery of the songs themselves as well as their environment; clean and pure and pristine, Let's Just Stay Here is obviously a modern Canadian alt-country album. What's borrowed (and updated): with classic (think Loretta Lynn) designs of old country transplanted North from the Southern states to a similar climate in the middle of Canada, songs like “All Time Low,” “Officer Down” and “Saskatoon Tonight” represent a new kind of old. Finally, there's something blue here certainly – and it is the sentiments expressed through the whole damned record. Not a note isn't touched with the thoughts of loves lost, mistakes made and the resigned inclination to press on – even if it's not clear why there's any point in doing so.
Mazel tov.
From the opening breeze of “All Time Low,” singers Carolyn Mark and Neville Quinlan lay out the dry-eyed lamentation they've trapped in and invite listeners in to join them and weep a while. In this narrative landscape, the world is a dim and lonely place but the band pours its heart and soul into it just the same in the hope that it may create a warm place in the sun for them. It does – by degrees – as the darkness remains intact but, in songs like “All Time Low,” “The 2nd Time” and “Passing Dream,” there is hope for something better even if it isn't easy to see; through these songs, it's the need to believe that sustains the singers (just as it was for Richard and Linda Thompson before they divorced) and it's contrasted by the band as well as the composition of the songs. To wit, in this aural environment, the instrumental backing provides the cold air, and dim, worrisome surroundings on Let's Just Stay Here, and the singers offer the warm and woeful but inviting center to shelter listeners.
Eventually Mark and Quinlan do find the strength to rage out against their environment too and, for the time it takes to play through “Canada Day Off/Toronto,” the singers win their side over the instrumental chills. It feels like a triumph against significant odds given the surrounding material, but also serves as the foil that makes it easy to find and fall for the push in the preceding songs too. After the residual festivities of “Too Sober To Sleep,” the morning after has truly set in on “Sunday Morning” and the singers find that their problems hadn't dissolved with the good times, they only waited for the singers to catch a breath of sanity saving fresh air before descending again. The unhappiness endures but, after having seen the light, the game has changed; they're no longer lost and they're making amends (beautifully on “When I Come Back”). That's the journey exhausted and it's easy to believe in the title track as it closes the record. On Let's Just Stay Here, Carolyn Mark and Neville Quinlan go through hell together but come out still looking up – so the title track just makes the best point to end on. It's not perfect, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.
Artist:
www.carolynmark.com/
www.myspace.com/carolynmark
Download:
Carolyn Mark and NQ Arbuckle – "All Time Low" – Let's Just Stay Here
Album:
Let's Just Stay Here is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
