RIYL: astroPuppees, Nina Gordon, Juliana Hatfield
As slight and pretty as a sundress on the first day of June, Kelley Ryan’s Twist finds the astroPuppees frontwoman making a deliberate shift away from what she calls “the rock boy way” of doing things, and toward a gentler sound, driven largely by acoustic guitars and layers of lush harmonies. Ryan’s in good company here, too: She recorded Twist with Don Dixon and Marti Jones, drafted Van Dyke Parks to lend string arrangements to a pair of tracks, and dug into the Beck songbook for a cover of “Lost Cause.” All solid marks in Twist’s favor, to be certain, and when the album lives up to its pedigree – as on the shimmering, gently descending opening track, “About a Girl” – it feels like a long-lost artifact from the golden mid ‘80s era of jingle-jangly singer-songwriter pop. Too often, though, Ryan uses her stylistic shift as a license to hide behind arrangements that don’t do much besides lie there and look pretty, or rhyme “love” with “above.” The end result is an album that might leave you feeling like you’ve just woken up from a pleasant dream – it’s soft, and warm, and no more than five minutes after it’s over, you won’t remember a thing. It’ll add an interesting wrinkle for astroPuppees fans, but there’s no shortage of similar-sounding records, and for anyone who isn’t already familiar with Ryan’s work, this really isn’t enough of a Twist. (Manatee Records 2010)
