from todays salon.com
The Mary Janes
"Record No. 1" | Delmore
By Bill Wyman | "Shooting Star," the first song on the Mary Janes' debut
album, starts out soft and resigned -- "Pale Blue Eyes" as reinterpreted
through the uncynical mind of a Midwestern woman. But as a violin, a
thumping drum and other voices kick in, you begin to understand that the
woman, Janas Hoyt, is after something more than a sanitized Velvets
retread; the song, nearly eight minutes long, turns out to be epically
scaled, and emotionally afire. One doesn't want to spoil the surprises of
such an ambition; suffice to say that, in the end, Hoyt and her quiet, six-
piece ensemble achieve something in rock truly rare: the truly orgasmic.
The Mary Janes began as an offshoot of an Indiana band called the Vulgar
Boatmen; the original all-female ensemble has now evolved into a mixed
aggregation marked distinctively by its two violinists. Hoyt writes the songs,
sings and plays all the guitars. In the early years of this decade the
Boatmen, themselves tangentially related to a better-known Amerindie outfit
called the Silos, played a part in the secret history of what's now called
alternative country, a strange mélange of assertively noncoastal, country-
inflected bands displaying odd lessons learned from punk. More than any of
them, the Boatmen, while largely unheard outside the Midwest, specialized
in an emotionally volatile palette of atmospherics, these achieved largely
through acoustic recording techniques and restrained, mostly unelectronic
instrumentation.
Atmosphere is what the Mary Janes do best. On "Record No. 1," Hoyt, who
also produced the record, uses "feel" -- the space in the air between the
instruments, the softness of the production, the lack of compression in the
recording -- most successfully to create a slightly dissonant, emotionally
somber setting for her songs. Even when she's singing something upbeat,
darker straits lurk below, and even when she's being optimistic the
atmosphere quivers with ambiguity. The other undeniable presence on the
record is her supple, ringing voice, which can breathe and keen, whisper
and howl. Hoyt emerges as an extravagant song constructor whose
reliance on strings for texture doesn't trivialize or soften the songs' force;
instead, they provide a drony, Velvets-ish tension that's nicely ameliorative
of the sometimes one-dimensional lyrics.
The album is most thrilling when the dynamics, sound and Hoyt's voice
come together. On "Part of Me Now" the killer chorus serves both to anchor
the song and hurl it dynamically ahead. What begin as conventional tracks -
- "Throwing Pennies," for example -- suddenly take flight with iridescent,
almost hypnotic string passages. And on the closing "Final Days," Hoyt
pulls off another stunner -- a song of musical and emotional extremes, and
one with a refreshing burst of wearied pessimism: "Time's not really on your
side," she wails. "Record No. 1" is an unprepossessing gem -- entrancingly
subdued, empty of postmodern posturing, filled instead with older and,
some would say, better things: Beauty, ambition and something like grace.
