The O'sWe Are the O’sReview

Ah, the pantheon of great Texan songwriters: Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson… it’s a long and distinguished list that will not be extended to include Taylor Young and John Pedigo.

Some years ago a lot of fuss was made about The Be Good Tanyas, a three-girl group from Vancouver. Apparently they were authentic and rootsy, with bluegrass influences. When this writer went to see them he discovered what that meant: the band had a banjo and couldn’t play it particularly well. And that’s what we have here.

The banjo is the distinguishing sound of The O’s. It’s played in that insipid, semi-clawhammer style used by those who have converted from being not very good guitarists, or who failed to make it into a bluegrass band. The guitar playing is no more accomplished, by the way.

Of course none of this matters if the songs are strong, but they’re not. They are meandering, inconsequential and immature; the sort of songs you write late at night when you’ve been dumped by your girlfriend and you’re very drunk and “the words just flow”, only to be read in the morning with horror at their crassness and predictability. There is no craft, no subtlety.  In I Still Wait they try to convey emotion by Singing Really Loud, almost to the point of hysteria. Lyle Lovett would just have sung those lines quieter.

In their blurb, to their credit, they are appropriately self-denigrating, and reviewers have been kind, using words like “amiable” and “spirited”, but what irks is the possibility that newcomers could be introduced to the wonderfully rich and varied world of Americana, old-time and bluegrass through an album like this, never to be exposed to the real thing. So skip this album and head straight to work by Nickel Creek, Guy Clark, the New Lost City Ramblers or Ricky Skaggs.