Album Review: the JaneDear girls by the JaneDear girls

The bigfoot stomp of the JaneDear girls’ debut album isn’t entirely unfamiliar ground for producer John Rich, but he’s not exactly forcing his Big & Rich gonzo blueprint upon Susie Brown and Danelle Leverett either. Brown and Leverett are commercially savvy enough to know what sells, whether it’s the va-va-voom glamour of their album cover or the Auto-Tuned vocals on the Miranda Lambert-meets-Carrie Underwood thump of “Merry Go Round,” and they have a hand in the writing of every song here. Sometimes this professionalism results in a tad too much slickness, particularly when the duo eases into ballads that surge so strongly no emotion registers, but when the JaneDear girls are flirting with tacky, spangly four-four beats and hook-heavy crossovers, they wind up with appealingly glitzy, crisp country-pop.

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Another week, another shrill country duo making a horrible first impression. Whereas Steel Magnolia wastes their legitimately strong voices on dull, hook-less material, the JaneDear Girls use a couple of catchy melodies and garish costumes to mask the fact that they can’t sing even a little bit, and, if they could, wouldn’t have a single authentic thing to say. In other words, they’re exactly what country music, in the throes of a pretty severe identity crisis, doesn’t need right now: its own Katy Perry.

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Yuck The British band Yuck has all the lazy affect of late-1980s to early-1990s indie rock, its guitars tuned to somewhere just north of indifferent. But this band’s self-titled debut (on Fat Possum) is disarming all the same, certain to be one of the year’s most unabashedly beautiful albums ….

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