CD Review: Shelley Short-- Local Cut

CD Review: Shelley Short

October 7th, 2009 [6:09AM] Posted by: Michael Mannheimer | 0 COMMENTS

Shelley Short A Cave, A Canoo

(Hush)

[MONSTER OF FOLK] It’s easy to look over the past decade of music and examine the fate of many niche genres born, seemingly, out of the rise of the Internet and writers’ overzealous ambitions to create something new. Back in 2004, San Francisco recluse Devendra Banhart curated a compilation of contemporary “freak folk” songs, The Golden Apples of the Sun, that skewed toward the weird end of the spectrum. It was a genre that quickly dissipated into more standard rock tropes (Americana, blues riffs and, sadly, Banhart’s infatuation with classic rock), but landmarks still exist that keep the freak flag flying.

With her new disc A Cave, A Canoo, you can place Portlander Shelley Short in that camp. While Short’s previous records, including last year’s pretty but underwhelming Water for the Day, were standard country-folk fare, A Cave, A Canoo is a fragile and odd collection of experimental folk songs. Like the work of White Hinterland—another Portland folkie who tends to traffic in the esoteric—the record is flush with juxtapositions: Short’s girly, Joanna-Newsom-sings-Patsy-Cline voice is set against a warm bed of accordion, pianos, plucked guitars and, most interestingly, the languid guitar textures of collaborator Alexis Gideon.

The record is intentionally sparse and withdrawn, but it’s the moments of color and beauty provided by Gideon’s guitar playing that initially sparkle. “Time Machine/Submarine” opens with just Short’s voice and plucked nylon-string acoustic before Gideon’s guitar rolls over the song like the last waves before the tide goes out. The songs benefit from these subtle touches, and it’s the moments of texture—the whistle that offsets mournful strumming, flute and upright bass on “Mockingbird”; the tape-machine hiss on “Tap the Old Bell”—that distinguish it from her other work.

Despite Gideon’s involvement, there’s no doubt this is Short’s show. Most of the record’s 10 somber songs are written in the first person, but it’s not overly wordy: Short writes like a poet, with tiny couplets that sound just as good on your stereo as they look on the page. That accounts for both the intentional misspelling of “canoe” in the album’s title and the way her songs are broad and infinite enough to encompass multiple interpretations. In the lilting “Racehorse,” Short says, “I am tipping forward, windstorm/ This place sounds like a trumpet, brass horn/ Future be what future want to.” If the future of folk music sounds anything like A Cave, A Canoo, then we have nothing to worry about.

SEE IT: Shelley Short plays Holocene on Wednesday, Oct. 7, with Glen Moore and the Golden Bears. 8:30 pm. $8. 21+.

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