Album Review: Make My Head Sing... by Jessica Lea Mayfield

Jessica Lea Mayfield’s third studio album follows 2011’s Tell Me, which—like several of her earlier efforts—was produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Instead of building off the country-rock grandeur of previous outings, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter goes Auerbach-less and takes a fearless detour into electronic pop and ’90s alternative rock. While the lovelorn energy of Mayfield’s country ballads are often obfuscated by guitar fuzz, the new crunch fits her nicely.

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Jessica Lea Mayfield grew up touring in her Kent, Ohio family’s bluegrass band before going solo. Black Keys’ man Dan Auerbach produced her first two lauded albums, but this latest – recorded in Nashville – was the rocker’s own work, and is gritty where 2011’s ‘Tell Me’ was polished and nuanced. Mayfield plumps for a back-to-basics sound here: hubbie Jesse Newport on bass, Matt Martin on drums and Mayfield with boot-toe pressing a bank of distortion and FX pedals.

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After cutting two albums with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, singer, songwriter, and guitarist Jessica Lea Mayfield decided to go it alone for Make My Head Sing..., her ATO debut. While her previous offerings have been somewhat confessional singer/songwriter affairs that juxtaposed rootsy Americana and indie pop, this date moves in almost an entirely different direction. Co-produced with her husband, bassist Jesse Newport, the pair played everything except drums -- not that there's much else.

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Jessica Lea Mayfield’s third album opens with the loud, percussive crunch and grind of an electric guitar, thudding loudly and precipitously—definitely the most intrusive sound to creep its way into any of her songs. That opening volley of “Oblivious” sounds like a school bus falling into a ravine, or perhaps a piece of rusted machinery designed to cleave and separate this album from its predecessors in Mayfield’s small catalog. For eight years now, the Ohio singer/songwriter has proved one of the more intriguing artists on the fringes of alt-country, with a blurry, slurry vocal delivery and a wry lyrical style that allows for a very frank cataloging of romantic regrets and bad decisions.

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Six years ago, Jessica Lea Mayfield was a precocious teenager singing simple, sullen country songs about hitting rock-bottom. On her third LP (and first without the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach producing), she's grown into a world-weary alt-rock dreamer. The set opens with the grungy "Oblivious" and its grown-up passive aggression: "I could kill her with the powers in my mind/But I'm a good humanitarian." Elsewhere, between tremulous indie textures and slow-core plucking, Mayfield renounces her own childishness ("Unknown Big Secret") and regrets past indiscretions ("Party Drugs").

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One of the lovelier songs on “Riverside,” the self-titled debut album of a sturdily approachable new jazz quartet, bears the title “Old Church, New Paint.” A slow waltz by the tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Chet Doxas, from Montreal, it inhabits a kind of arid terrain between Protestant ….

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Jessica Lea Mayfield appears to dwell on the dark side, and if the title to her latest opus is to be believed, then her head is filled with ominous musings indeed. Make My Head Sing… further affirms Mayfield’s fondness for purveying harrowing circumstance and atmospheric ambiance. It’s a scenario borne out by the scorching sounds inherent in songs such as “Pure Stuff,” “Party Drugs” and “No Fun,” a delivery that finds Mayfield’s sensuous vocals plied over a purely turgid undertow.

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