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REVIEWS

CD: "With Violets"

This is ruminative acoustic folk music: dark, intense, and musically and lyrically accomplished. Alli Collis's guitar picking may bear echoes of Jorma and Mississippi John Hurt, but whatever her inspirations may be, she has fused them into a melancholy style of her own. She's also a fearless vocalist, with an aching alto that wrenches maximum feeling from each line.

Collis's lyrics are both descriptive and evocative, inspired by experience, world travel and the cycles of life, emotional but never sentimental. The best of them bring to mind the imagery of a Joni Mitchell or David Crosby. The woodland hero of "Dying Tree" moans:

     sweeping wind, stinging cold,
     like the water that may kill me,
     puddles like oceans,
     spilling green and blue over me, i am lifeless...

but the song concludes with a life-affirming smile:

     perfect is the glow that lies beneath this
     brave and dying tree.

Her pictures and metaphors can be simultaneously touching and obscure, as in "County Line":

     i'm a meadow seeking thunder on a warm summer night,
     you're a county line borderin[g] me.

The CD is melancholy but never gloomy, and it closes with its most upbeat track, "Mr. Stranger," a love song with a djembe accompaniment that hints at what Collis might gain from a backing band. She could benefit from the greater variety of mood that more instrumentation could provide. But that's more an observation than a complaint; clocking in at well under 40 minutes, this tastefully produced gem of an album is, to paraphrase Collis herself, the sun of its own day and the moon of its own night.

Artist website: Alli Collis

CD: "Beauty Lied"

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies Denise Barbarita's lavishly (self-) produced Beauty Lied, a fine set of energetic and sophisticated pop-rock that takes on numerous styles and kicks all of their asses.

"It's What You Said," the opening track, starts out with a wash of sound effects which gives way to a mid-tempo acoustic guitar thump. The narrator makes a powerful declaration of independence via a catchy gutpunch of a chorus. This leads into "The Darkest Hour," a song about vulnerability unexpectedly energized by an off-rhythmic nod to Zeppelin's "Kashmir." The garage-y and danceable "In July" and "15" show Barbarita's lighter side, while "On Your Side" - where she sounds uncannily like Tori Amos - is as pretty a ballad as you are likely to find anywhere.

"He Said She Said" approaches the grungy intensity of Alice in Chains or Live, sharpened and shined - but not in any way diluted - by a feminine sensibility. Also noteworthy is the final track, the gospel-tinged "What I Believe," which, though it may not quite attain the anthemic status it reaches for, has an impressive amount of soul.

When, as an ignorant teen, I first heard Led Zeppelin, I thought they must have two different lead singers, one doing the verses in a normal tenor voice and another singing the super-high parts and the screaming. I also found it hard to believe that David Bowie the baritone of "Heroes" was the same person as David Bowie the nasal whiner of "Ziggy Stardust." (Thankfully, I know a little more about singing now than I did then.) Denise Barbarita doesn't present multiple vocal personalities to that extent, but one has the feeling that she could if she wanted to. To her credit, she uses her trained, powerful voice, precise control, and creativity as a producer to show her songs to their best advantage, not to overwhelm them or show off. As singer, songwriter, and sound artist/producer, Denise Barbarita is a classic triple threat.

Artist website: Denise Barbarita