Melissa Ferrick's Valentine Heartache
With this album on my lap, I'm a bit apprehensive. Please don't give me another broken-hearted chick (dyke or otherwise) singing her misery to me. I hate that. But I adore Melissa Ferrick. I love her intense-bordering-on-obsessive playing style. I know she's a sucker for tragic love songs, but I can handle one or two. Then I look at the track list and see titles like "Break Up Song," "Mercy" and "I Still Love You." Oh, shit.
Ferrick's last album was called Freedom. She was rolling with the punches and throwing a few, as well. So how does one go from declaring "freedom" to winding up back in the um, hole? Simple. Fall in love again. Then break up. Rewind to when life sucked.
An indicator of where Ferrick is writing from on Valentine Heartache is track one, "Welcome to My Life." It's the life of a commercially underappreciated lesbo folk-rock singer who tours a lot and has a rabid following and a penchant for crashing through love's trapdoors. She's looking for The One. Until then, she's just going through the motions. She rattles off a bunch of cities, from Boise to Brooklyn, wondering in which The One will appear. She sounds disillusioned, a ways from freedom.
"Crack the Mirror" starts out with Ferrick talk-singing, "Stuck in my bed/I'm a catastrophe in my head/I got eight things in the air/The phone's ringing off the hook/And I can't bear to look." But she does look. And look. And look until the looking becomes hunting, and the goods just ain't there. So she doesn't eat or sleep, winds up on the doctor's couch, "And the doctor says/It's a neurological thing." She picks anxiously at her guitar instead of plowing down the strings like she did on past albums. Her run-on vocals are still there, but the muscle isn't. This time around, there's more twang in the guitar strings and less of a rush to get out her emotions. Ferrick has found herself a good match in drummer Brian Winton. His scant beats provide a steady?but not too steady?foundation.
But if you're looking for an introduction to Melissa Ferrick's music, this album doesn't do her justice. For the most part, it's missing the intensity and spastic energy of 1998's breakthrough Everything I Need. Back then, everything she needed was "right here in [her] hands." Now it sounds like that guitar in her hands is not enough. Melodies are plucked out, choruses are scant and the songs blend into one another, sounding too similar. Many of the lyrics are downright corny.
Still, there are two gems here that redeem Ferrick, somewhat. On "E-Mail," she tells the record company guy to blow it out his ass as he patronizes her "Like I'm some 20-year-old/poet with tits." She's the one who knows what the fans want because she's out there partying and playing for them, while the money whore is at home checking his e-mail. The music here reclaims its pulse and dances itself into a frenetic cloud of guitar, drums, horns and free-flowing vocals laced with a sneer. Then a cover of Patty Griffin's "Moses" closes the album, and while the song is about loneliness, the music isn't swathed in misery. Ferrick snaps to life, screaming out her frustration in time to a killer groove. I'm left hopeful for the next go-round because even she's sick of her bumming. On "Break Up Song" she sings, "I'm sick of writing this song/About how love always disappears." So maybe there'll be an end to these lovesick songs.