Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
The Audreys :: "Oh Honey"From Between Last Night And Us (True North/Australian Broadcasting Company; 2006)
For some reason, in my head, Sarah McLachlan, Sarah Slean, and Sarah
Harmer all have something in common.
Besides that.
I'm not sure if it's because they'll all play St. John's, Newfoundland
during the run of a North American tour, or if it's because I
associate them all with schooners, or if their songs always feature
prominently during East Coast open mic nights in Fredericton, or St.
John's, or Halifax, or if they all probably wouldn't have careers if
it weren't for Ani DiFranco, or if they all make music that either
reminds Canadians of porches or boots drying in porches. Maybe it's
banjos. Or Ontario cottages. Or prairies or wheatfields or mountains.
Or maybe it's just the fact that they've got some weird cross-Canada
sound about them all. That includes fiddling.
The Audreys have this too, especially the porch quality, except they
come by it less honestly, since they're from Adelaide, Australia, last
shark attack roughly 5 months ago. They overcompensate for this,
dressing in Anne of Green Gables period grain-tone suits, and
generally sowing the cute "genteel" thing like so many Petunias
(http://www.petuniamusic.com) do better. Thing is, they're likely
going to earn places on Brock dormroom cd racks one handspun coattail
at a time, because behind the get-up, they do the backyard
Sunday-afternoon rocking-chair organic folkloric thing as well as any
of their birkpop predecessors.
Except for this song. "Oh Honey" was the lead single in Australia, and
was picked up by the types of radio stations that chose Rubies and Return to Sea and even Fishscale as "albums of the
week." Critics screwed themselves over: knowing that the band's album
was made for all-ages crowds in pubs that serve more hot chocolate
than Guinness, the smuttiest they'd get was "You can hear the sexual
frustration in Taasha Coates' voice." So, so wrong. Live, Coates
introduces the song by explaining "You think it would have worked out,
you get a good man, you write a sexy song for him, but, ladies, you
know that sometimes it just doesn't work out." "Oh Honey" (by rights
there should be a comma there) was almost certainly recorded when
things were going very, very well. And the before/after tension suggests that there's a different, darker, dirtier, and more persuasive record trying to burst out of this one, short song.
Coates' voice creaks and wanes like Feist at her better moments,
except she doesn't have the BSS pop deluge to contend with, so the
subtleties say more. Here it's just a loping, plucked guitar and her
pleading: "Oh honey, don't you do that thing to me… don't you sing like
that to me, all dark and low, to me." But then the drums, and the
screechy, muffled banshee guitar line, knock a picture frame off the
wall, and Coates works her way to the foreseeable: "So, honey, don't
you come for me, don't you come round here [I mean] for me." Yeah, it
could have been done to sharper extremes, but that would have breached
the record's politesse standard. As it stands, however, this one brief
glimpse of Alannah Myles will hopefully be the sound pushed out from
under True North's collective hemp shop poncho. Except, you know, it's
probably a little too butterscotch for Lillith.
Aaron Newell :: 16 May 2006 |
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