Stirring together an amalgam of familiar feelings and inspirational reference points, California-by-way-of-the-Midwest songwriter
Anna St. Louis lands in an open field of melancholic beauty on her debut album,
If Only There Was a River. The album follows a roughly drawn demo cassette from 2015 and a promising but brief 2017 release entitled First Songs, and expands greatly on the ideas that were in their germination stages on those releases. From the start,
St. Louis' take on country-folk looked to lonely-hearted pioneers like
Patsy Cline and
Loretta Lynn as much as it did '60s ramblers like
Neil Young,
Buffy Sainte-Marie, and
Karen Dalton. With the 11 songs that make up
If Only, the singer retains both the warmth and darkness of her earlier songs but allows the emotional content to come into full definition. Upgraded arrangement and production help this goal, as
St. Louis is joined by like-minded songwriter
Kevin Morby, violinist Oliver Hill, and
King Tuff's Kyle Thomas throughout the album, backing her up on various instruments and helping out with production.
St. Louis' voice is in the center of every tune, but arrangements shift from song to song, recasting the role of the vocals and altering the mood dramatically. Over the record's course,
St. Louis presents sleepy full-band barn-dance fare like the wistful searching of "Understand" and the traditionally modeled fiddle workout "Hello," but shifts gears for the skeletal creep of the bass/vocals dirge "Freedom" and the strange pastoral ache of the title track. At times this makes for a slightly disjointed flow to the album, but even the wonky flow can act as a reference point in
St. Louis' studied patchwork, recalling the same jagged feel that accompanied the seemingly random track listing of
Karen Dalton's masterful
In My Own Time. Much like that classic album, or similarly complex works by
Leonard Cohen or
Gillian Welch,
If Only There Was a River is a grower, often dense in its outward simplicity. Restrained performances make for the best moments of the album, as on the slow wander of "Desert," where
St. Louis' voice lilts over hanging guitar chords and subtle shifts in production. The empty twilight feeling of the song threatens to burst into explosive release at any point, but never does. The same is true of "Mean Love," a patient but lamenting plea to an unavailable partner. The song builds tension in layers of multi-tracked vocals, organs, and dissonant shifts, but never breaks into a predictable resolution. Instead, it ends strangely, with a few spare notes ringing as the song softly fizzles out. The deliberate nature of
St. Louis' songs is hard to catch on first listen, as is the deep control she wields over her compositions.
If Only There Was a River rewards return listens with a deepening flow of new revelations and curiosities, as the power of the songs grows more apparent with each spin. ~ Fred Thomas