This endearingly odd, gutsy, and oft-surprising compilation unearths 16 long-forgotten and hard-to-find singer/songwriter gems from the '60s and early '70s. While most of the songs superficially could be labeled as "folk," there is very little here that could be considered formulaic, commercial, or uninspired. For better or worse, these idiosyncratic and intense young women followed their muses down some pretty bizarre paths: some haunting, some beautiful, some crazy, and some just utterly mystifying.
Past & Present
This album did not make much of an impact on me the first few times that I heard it, aside from the instantly gratifying highlights of Anna Black’s Nina Simone-esque cover of timeless suicide anthem “Gloomy Sunday” and Mary McCaslin’s bleak interpretation of The Supremes' “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” As I listened to it more and more, however, I began to notice the lyrics and it began dawning on me just how warped and unique many of these songs are: most of these ladies had some seriously heavy shit that they wanted to convey (albeit often in a drug-, J.R.R. Tolkien-, or God-damaged way). Admittedly, ambition far overreaches talent in some cases, but it certainly makes for a singularly compelling listen. The earnestness required to compose a song about a “candle that burns through the darkness and ignorance of man” or an imaginary dialogue with Satan is a rare commodity these days.
Women Blue is packed full of ear-catching moments, but one of the more noteworthy ones is Michele’s bizarrely hostile torch song “Blind as You Are,” which features spacey electronic flourishes beneath its coldly brutal musings (“You can die, blind as you are. No one will care.”) and urges listeners to “break down the Babylonian wall.” Of course, there are also a number of songs that are just plain good in a relatively straightforward way, particularly Kathy McCord’s powerful “I Will Never Be Alone Again” and Rosalie Sorrels’ dark and twangy “In The Quiet Country of Your Eyes.” Also, I don’t usually get very exited about liner notes, but I found many of the artist’s stories intriguing (Michele was rumored to be an actual broomstick-riding witch, for example) and useful in providing context. I sure wish there was a lyric sheet though.
The two artists that definitively cement Women Blue’s essentiality for me are Amanda Trees and Dayle Stanley. Both veer quite decisively into the realm of outsider art and, unsurprisingly, both women are shrouded in mystery. Stanley was active in the Boston folk scene in the early '60s, but disappeared after releasing two well-regarded albums. Her “Cry The Mountains White” is notable for several reasons: for one, she belts it out like she is auditioning for a high school talent show; secondly, she often yodels in a bizarre, underwater-sounding way; and finally, her lyrics are deeply odd and seem to combine Lord of the Rings-esque mythology with details of her own life (“If I could go, I’d follow you to the hateful mountains white, Steven.”). Trees (about whom virtually nothing is known) is a bit more understated, fragile, and conventionally melodic in her delivery, but her lyrics are exponentially weirder still: “Queen Wilhelmina” tackles snow, scarves, horse-drawn spaceships, ghosts, gardens, Wall Street, and disillusionment with her friends all within a roughly four minute span. It isn’t quite stream-of-consciousness, either; it actually seems like Trees believes there to be a perfectly plausible narrative arc linking everything together. Both women seem far too effortlessly surreal and uncommercial to have ever made it into a recording studio or convinced anyone to release their albums, but I am certainly happy that they did.
Woman Blue is a truly impressive curatorial achievement, as Past & Present has plucked a uniformly compelling batch of songs from the deepest depths of obscurity and rarity (I tried to track down an Amanda Trees album and could only find one available in the entire world...in Greece.). More importantly, however, these eclectic songstresses each had their own unique vision and sang with a great deal of conviction. This is serious art, not failed pop music. No one featured on this album got here simply because they wrote a pleasant melody or had a nice voice, these women were swinging for the fences (so to speak). Anyone interested in folk music will find a lot to like here, but the truly revelatory moments are reserved for those in search of inspired eccentricity and general soul-baring weirdness.
samples:
- Kathy McCord – I Will Never Be Alone Again
- Anna Black – Gloomy Sunday
- Amanda Trees – Queen Wilhelmina
