Gillian Welch doesn't play rock music, but the determination with which she has cast herself into a role that by no right belongs to her shows pure rock attitude. This child of Hollywood television-theme composers moved to Nashville after an apprenticeship in the folk dens of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Boston. Despite her affection for the Pixies, Welch abandoned the present tense altogether in favor of museum-careful invocations of bluegrass and old country music.
James Agee and listening to Folkways recordings. "Tear My Stillhouse Down" is the lament of a dying moonshiner, "Annabelle" a Christian Gothic tale, "Acony Bell" a homely lesson in mountain horticulture. Concentrate only on the sound, and these songs will haunt you; Welch's musical precision is eerie, the mark of a true obsessive so deeply wedded to her subject that she has become it.
Ultimately, though, Welch's gorgeous testimonies manufacture emotion rather than express it. Unlike the new-country artists she admires – Steve Earle, for example, or Lucinda Williams – Welch never takes the risk of wondering what her own experience might bring to the tradition she so fervently embraces, how her own life might break down that tradition and make it fresh again.
Patti Rothberg demonstrates a far less troublesome relationship to her sources, maybe because her sources are still alive to kick back when Rothberg gleefully violates them. She's working the opposite end of Welch's roots romance, taking on the bohemian tradition in all its city-slick, streetwise, drifter glory. You can hear Joni and Janis and Rickie Lee and Cyndi in Rothberg; her peers include all those attitude-fueled culture babes dominating MTV these days: Joan Osborne, Tracy Bonham, Jewel. But Rothberg lifts herself out of the morass by messing with the clichés she can't resist until they sound as though she made them up herself.
On Between the 1 and the 9, Rothberg invokes rainbows ("Change Your Ways"), sunshine ("Perfect Stranger") and friends who'll be with her until the bitter end ("Inside"), but she sounds as if she's arching her eyebrows when she does so. It's not that she doesn't mean it – it's just that the words don't matter as much as the scenes they describe. Or as much as the music, which is the best evidence that Rothberg's particular dream of freedom has succeeded. Her snarly, smiley voice helps her make these songs into conversations that could easily take place in your favorite seedy nightspot, and her melodies make you want to identify because they're so fun to sing along with. (RS 735)
ANN POWERS
