Album Reviews

“She brushes off comparisons to Billie Holiday,” according to Mobile Fidelity’s online blurb. Why? That’s like denying the elephant in the room. Peyroux’s squooshy vibrato and top of the throat delivery produce sly vocal timbres that just about channel Billie Holiday between your speakers. Even the miking and equalization have been carefully chosen to sustain the Holiday allusion and almost mimic the mellow recording quality of the time, just as the inner gatefold photography and Peyroux’s outfits reprise the visuals of the ‘40s. It’s canny but I find it distracting and mannered.

This album from September, 2004 came eight years after Peyroux’s 1996 debut which I haven’t heard. If the debut’s vibe is anything like this cool, somewhat facile Norah Jones-ish Larry Klein production, we know who came first. Otherwise it’s Peyroux finding inspiration from Jones’ debut.

Whichever it is, Peyroux does sound like Billie Holiday channeled through Norah Jones with production and A&R by a Starbuck’s executive. I know that sounds effete, cynical and mean-spirited, but that was my first reaction based upon knowing zero about Peyroux going in.

The A&R choices are eclectic and ingenious. Songs by Dylan, Elliot Smith, Leonard Cohen, Hank Williams and W.C. Handy and others get the same soothing treatment. The novelty wears off fairly quickly, even as one’s admiration for the considerable musical technique and the clarity of vision remains. Studio wiz Dean Parks on guitar, Larry Goldings on keyboards and David Piltch on bass are but a few of the musical participants, all of whom submerge themselves for the good of the laid back concept.

I’m unfamiliar with recording engineer Helik Hadar, but he’s a brilliant sculptor of intimate, three-dimensional sound, who manages to transparently finesse a ‘40’s tonal vibe into a thoroughly modern-sounding production. The recording’s depth of field is astonishing, with a holographic piano, for instance, stepping forth from between the speakers, while a muted horn appears behind in a corner, almost beyond the horizon. Musical timbres are warm, as you might expect, but not cloyingly so and overall, this is one of the finest sounding contemporary recordings I’ve heard over the past decade or more. It’s really amazing, whatever the storage medium.

I have trouble getting behind a record like this. It strikes me as a beautiful bauble that’s monochromatic and hollow at its emotional core. I admire it from afar, I enjoyed listening to it, but I don’t think I will ever want to listen to it again now that I’ve completed the review.