Reviews

Oh Susanna

Short Stories

Digg this review.
Add to del.ico.us.

Review Date: 2007-05-24

I had a hard time getting started on this review for Short Stories, the latest album from Oh Susanna. The album's sort of left me speechless -- not because I was wowed beyond words, or to disgusted to come up with something to say. Just because I was left in the middle.

The hallmarks of alt-country are here -- gentle steel guitar, lyrics telling stories of love and travels. The album's title is meant to be taken literally, and these songs does play out as a collection of eleven short narratives. Oh Susanna -- Suzie Ungerleider -- is clearly a fan of the storytelling song, and she mostly gets that across well in her lyrics. Her inspirations are fairly disparate -- family history, poetry, non-fiction books -- but they're all coming from ordinary people with something to talk about.

The problem is that sometimes those lyrics come across as too simplistic. The rhymes are a little too obvious on songs like "Pretty Face", where Ungerleider sounds not quite comfortable to be so happy. And lyrical conventions like flying away and haunted dreams are relied on a little too heavily at times.

It's not that the rest of the album is without its merits. There are songs that touch on the dark stories Ungerleider is known for telling in her music. "Beauty Queen" has her singing the tale of an abused woman who fights back, inspired by a Carl Sandburg poem, while "Three Shots" promises someone will go down with guitar that makes it sound like Ungerleider means it.

The highlight of the album, through and through, is Ungerleider's voice. It's rich, but capable of being gentle and foreboding, sometimes in the same song. I just feel like these songs don't quite do it justice. They're not bad -- the instrumentals are good, the singing is good, they're well-constructed. But I feel like most of the tracks are missing that something that makes a track really hit you and become one of those songs you have to listen to over and over and over.

That's my biggest problem with this collection of songs -- they just don't stick. The characters here are interesting while they have their time with the listener, but I don't find myself thinking about them once I'm doing something else. Their stories leave me after their three-and-a-half minutes have run out.

Score: 6.7

- Terri