Personnel: Karry Walker, and friends

http://www.ultralash.com

1. Kitchen Song
2. BMW
3. Afterglow
4. Dandelion
5. Flying Colors
6. Cabernet
7. Barbiewhore
8. Spades
9. Clover
10. Bunny
11. Laces
12. Twenty Four

Karry Walker's voice has a delicate quaver that's like Robin
Holcomb's. It's nasal, with a mountain twang beauty, as sharp and
refreshing as pine needles. Like Holcomb, her music refers to a
mythic American past, steeped in folk traditions. Her bedroom folk
combines bits of trip-hop and Appalachia, the samples and drum
machines dueling with banjos and the creek of rocking chairs on the
porch. Her lyrics are enigmatic puzzles, fragments of short story
detail and corrosive imagery.

"Kitchen Song" describes the life of a homeless prostitute with wry
grit: "My hair smells like an ashtray/ And there's 17 coats on the
bed where I slept." The minor key melody is catchy. The minor key
melancholy of "BMW" concerns a woman being questioned by the cops
about her missing lover. A potentially lurid scene from the TV
show "Cops" is transformed into a little epiphany of love and
tenderness. Tentative banjo notes and funereal organs open the
cryptic "Dandelion." Walker recites, like a backwoods
oracle, "Dandelion/Take a tire iron/To my skull/ And render me
null." "Barbiewhore" is fuzzy-crispy indie rawk, as lacerating as
early P.J. Harvey.

Suzanne Vega meets Shannon Wright in these musical novels, as
intricate and haphazardly beautiful as quilts.

--Craig L. Gidney