Funny thing about musicians; they\u2019re often happiest when making music.<\/p>\n
Sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire were the core of the Dixie Chicks before anyone had ever heard of Natalie Maines, who has been their lead vocalist since their 1998 major-label debut Wide Open Spaces<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 With four years passed since the Chicks\u2019 2005 album Taking The Long Way<\/i> and Maines not yet ready to start work on a new album, the restless Robison and Maguire decided last year that the time was right to try recording without her.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Court Yard Hounds<\/i> is the debut effort of the sisters\u2019 new side project, on which they are accompanied by many familiar faces from the Dixie Chicks\u2019 entourage, up to and including Natalie\u2019s pop Lloyd Maines on slide guitar.\u00a0 The resulting album is both unsurprising and full of familiar pleasures, shining a brighter spotlight on Robison\u2019s appealing voice and Maguire\u2019s superb harmonies and fiddle playing.\u00a0 It also gives the duo a chance to stretch their songwriting muscles, as the Dixie Chicks have often relied on outside songwriters, even for the mostly self-composed Taking The Long Way<\/i>, where the trio had help from an all-star roster of co-writers including Dan Wilson (Semisonic), Gary Louris (Jayhawks), Neil Finn (Crowded House) and Keb\u2019 Mo\u2019.\u00a0 The primary writer on this disc is Robison, often in tandem with the duo\u2019s guitar player Martin Strayer.<\/p>\n
One of the sources of this burst of creativity was Robison\u2019s divorce, which means this cycle of songs talks a lot about fairytale endings that don\u2019t quite happen, wanting to be with someone you can\u2019t be with, loneliness, heartbreak and renewed independence.\u00a0\u00a0 Robison takes almost all of the lead vocals and does a terrific job; her voice is softer than Maines\u2019, to be sure, but it\u2019s plenty strong enough, and in fact sounds quite a bit like Sheryl Crow, who likewise got her start as a harmony vocalist.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
As is the case with the Dixie Chicks, Court Yard Hounds build their music on a country foundation but decline to be bound by genre, featuring fiddle, steel guitar and banjo while ranging confidently beyond the musical confines observed by most of their country music peers.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Right off the bat, the sisters dip into blues-folk (\u201cSkyline\u201d), lilting country-rock (\u201cThe Coast\u201d), and unleash a grooving bit of Ben Harper-esque country-soul in \u201cDelight (Something New Under The Sun)\u201d \u2013 at least for the first stanza of this tune, which has three distinct movements (country-soul-prog?).\u00a0 At 1:15 the guitars and drums come in and the song surges; from there it\u2019s a nice mid-tempo rock song that builds steadily until it soars to a false finish at 3:30, after which it returns with a concluding verse built on a completely different melody.<\/p>\n
Next up, Jakob Dylan stops in for a clever, beautifully executed country folk duet about lovers divided by climate and geography (\u201cSee You In The Spring\u201d).\u00a0 In true Dixie Chicks fashion, this smart but comfortable genre tune is followed by an intense workout that\u2019s far removed from anything the stereotypical country fan might anticipate.\u00a0 The sole Robison-Maguire co-write here, \u201cAin\u2019t No Son\u201d starts out bluegrass with fiddle and banjo prominent before kicking into a heavy country-rock arrangement supporting a song where Robison narrates the emotionally explosive confrontation between a gay son coming out and the father who angrily rejects him.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The middle section of the disc slows things down, with the spare ballad \u201cFairytale\u201d and the more-or-less by-the-numbers country number \u201cI Miss You\u201d bridging the gap to Maguire\u2019s solo composition (and sole lead vocal) \u201cGracefully.\u201d\u00a0 The latter is a pretty, keening ballad that reminds you that, like her sister, Maguire could easily make a case for working as a solo artist, but prefers to be part of a group — and the choice feels like a smart one.\u00a0 Robison\u2019s harmony vocals on Maguire\u2019s song are just as complementary as when the roles are reversed; this pair of voices just works phenomenally well together.<\/p>\n
The album closes out strongly with a trio of powerful tunes.\u00a0 \u201cThen Again\u201d feels like Sheryl Crow in one of her introspective, self-critical moods \u2013 a lo-fi, witty, foot-tapping song full of hard-won insight .\u00a0 The banjo and honky-tonk piano-driven \u201cIt Didn\u2019t Make A Sound\u201d is a kiss-off with a twist, a sassy, danceable declaration of independence.\u00a0 The disc closes with the acoustic ballad \u201cFear Of Wasted Time,\u201d an absolutely gorgeous collection of snapshots of Robison\u2019s life as a mother and career woman, rushing from place to place trying to make sure not a moment is wasted.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Co-produced by Robison and Maguire with Jim Scott, Court Yard Hounds<\/i> is an excellent piece of work that offers the duo an alternative outlet for doing what musicians do best.\u00a0 In general, it\u2019s a softer and more introspective complement to the sisters\u2019 other group, a series of quiet moments that only occasionally erupt into bolder tones. When two voices are this well matched, though, the pace hardly matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8579],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-41993","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-court-yard-hounds","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41993"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}