Mary Gauthier
Filth & Fire
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Mary Gauthier has spent most of her life fleeing her native Louisiana, but her songs still reside there. Like its title suggests, her third album is rife with soot and swelter, allegories for the troubles she ran from but couldn't shake. With her husky drawl, Southern touchstones and bluesy, country-folk fusion, comparisons to Lucinda Williams are obvious, particularly since Williams alum Gurf Morlix produced and played on this record. But she's actually closer to Steve Earle at his most subdued. Gauthier's American-gothic tales are darker than her contemporaries, delving into physical abuse, drug addiction, abject poverty and homelessness. She peers into a town laid waste by the sugar industry
Read More ("Sugar Cane") and into the ruined lives of thieves and junkies passing through a local flophouse ("Camelot Motel"), while spending holidays with the denizens of a bridge underpass ("Christmas in Paradise"). No matter how bad it gets, her plainspoken delivery and stark character sketches are objective -- almost to a fault -- but that's where Morlix works his magic. In his hands, spartan songs become soulful, worth lingering over the same way Gauthier tarries over words. MEREDITH OCHS
(July 9, 2002)
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