The folk trio
Sons of the Never Wrong
revel in their vocal interplay,
Bruce Roper
,
Deborah Lader
, and
Sue Demel
soaring and swooping around each other, repeating lines, harmonizing, and adding interesting musical tags to their melodies. The music they conjure is folk-plus: acoustic guitar-based tunes with lots of added elements, especially isolated strings and percussion that mirror the vocals' attractive mixing. The result is ear candy that has only one major flaw, but it's a big one. In folk music, lyrics matter, and
Roper
, who wrote eight of the 13 songs here, is a pretentious and obscure lyricist who tends to follow metaphors into absurdity rather than tying them to any meaning. He name-drops to no purpose --
Janis Ian
gets her name misspelled in the lyric sheet and
"Jonah"
and
Peter, Paul and Mary
turn up in
"Teva,"
though the way these names are used suggests
just liked the sound of them -- and he is not above misusing or creating words when he can't get his lines to work out otherwise. In
"One Simple Question,"
the word "lance" is changed nonsensically into "lancer" for the sake of a rhyme, while
"Hallelujah for the Getaway"
coins "disorte" apparently because
couldn't fit in the word "dissertation." This kind of bad writing might be less noticeable if
's two songs didn't mark her as such a superior writer.
"My Last Boyfriend,"
a touching account of an encounter with an old flame, is by far the album's best song, and
"Magnetic Poetry"
is sweet. Even
outdistances the group's main writer with her religious
"Home Hymn."
would be wise to make more extensive use of its distaff songwriters on subsequent releases unless
can learn to rein in his self-involved, willfully obscure verbosity. ~ William Ruhlmann