PRESS

Concert review:
Carolyn AlRoy at Cake Shop, May 26, 2007

She fought the sound and She won
She fought the sound and She won

Carolyn AlRoy fought the PA all the way through her 45-minute set, didn't break a sweat and ended up victorious. The only thing she couldn't do was get the crowd out of their seats to gather in front of the stage, but her entreaties were a lost cause: everyone was too comfy in their seats enjoying the show. AlRoy is defined by three things. She's an unusually terse lyricist, given to deceptively simple crystallizations. She's also a hookmeister: like her cohort onstage tonight, Ninth House frontman Mark Sinnis, she knows that hits are simple. They stick in your brain: you can hum them. AlRoy proved tonight how adept she is at writing catchy tunes, particularly the sad but ultimately hopeful Goner, with its addictive chorus.

AlRoy also displayed a beautiful, regretful, longing vocal delivery. It's a good hunch that most singer-songwriters are petrified to share the stage with someone who might conceivably steal their thunder, but not her. Bringing Sinnis up to sing harmonies was a stroke of genius, akin to listening to Lianne Smith and Mary Lee Kortes of Mary Lee's Corvette raising the roof together at a couple of shows at Lakeside last year. AlRoy put Sinnis on her more romantic numbers, and watching the two of them grinningly nudge each other to new heights of subtlety and good humor was lots of fun. Sinnis can croon with anybody, and displayed an impressive range that he virtually never uses when singing his own material. His loverboy playing off AlRoy's lovergirl was amusing to say the least: Peaches and Herb, eat your hearts out. The highlight of their duets was the old Johnny Cash/June Carter standard I Still Miss Someone, distinguished by an imaginative arrangement where AlRoy sang Johnny's lead line and Sinnis sang in a low baritone underneath it.

AlRoy mixed songs from her most recent cd Gorgeous Enormous in with a lot of new material. The most gripping new songs were the sad, resigned, countrypolitan hit Bad Habits - a dead ringer for an Owen Bradley number from the Patsy Cline era – and the devastatingly funny Comic Book World, a bouncy, major-key autopsy of a relationship, spiced with completely over-the-top Freudian imagery. She also did a very simple upbeat major-key number that sounded a lot like something Donna Susan might do.

- Alan Young, Lucid Culture, May 30, 2007

Choice pick: Carolyn AlRoy – Gorgeous Enormous

An auspicious, absolutely gripping full-length debut by this excellent NY area underground songwriter. It’s also an enormously gorgeous production job by rocker Matt Keating – who contributes his trademark incisive, melodic lead guitar and bass – and engineer Adam Lasus. This album has a lush yet immediate feel with its layers of guitars tastefully augmented by piano, accordion and strings. Musically, it blends mid-tempo, jangly guitar rock with a couple of sad accordion-driven waltzes, some quieter acoustic fare and a couple of covers, one of them astonishingly imaginative. AlRoy is a strikingly original, terse lyricist whose jabs and darts never fail to find their mark, which is all the more impressive considering that she got her start not in music but in the uber-pretentious New York poetry scene. As a singer, she distinguishes herself with an unwavering sense of melody and a highly nuanced, breathy delivery that blends devious subtlety with the stoic resignation of a teenage Marianne Faithfull. The cd’s second song is one of the sad waltzes, bitter and frustrated with being unable to connect to someone, fearing that it may be too late:
Woke up way too old/
Can’t shake this awful cold/
When the room is quiet and black/
I open the door just a crack
The next song, the charmingly bucolic Italian Parsley showcases AlRoy’s finely honed sense of irony and the absurd, an imagistic tour through a Park Slope of the mind "crowded with everything that you need to be alone." It also introduces the album’s central, recurring theme: the narrator of most of these songs is valiantly trying to come across as a blithe spirit, but no matter how hard she tries she can’t hide the fact that she’s skipping along the edge of a bottomless pit of despondency. Whoever she is, a semi-autobiographical character or a completely fictitious one, she’s mesmerizing. She draws you in and keeps you guessing – and actually giving a damn - whether she’s going to make it past the pit without falling in and disappearing. But she’s not going down without a fight, as she proves on The Sound of Revolution, a scorching rocker driven by a savage Keating riff.
This is the sound of revolution/
This is the sound of retribution…
the sound that tears make in the rain
AlRoy rails. A pervasive atmosphere of alienation and self-doubt takes over front and center on The Reality Song, belying the song’s sassy Nancy Sinatra spaghetti western bounce:
They call it a crush/
It takes all of my trust/
I keep bumping into you/
Yeah you crush me quite enough…/
If I create reality then there’s only me/
Is there anybody there left
to blame for this affair?
Always trying to be the good existentialist, and look where it gets her. On the cd’s centerpiece, Anything Can Happen redemption finally comes: or does it? Again, AlRoy’s voice is a dead giveaway. The melody soars in on a bed of electric guitars pulsing in and out to create a hypnotic, echoe-y backdrop: Keating calls this the album’s "Dark Side of the Moon" song:
Every day is the same/
I’m tired of my own name/
Everything I say frames/
My overwhelming shame/
Free, free from chains/
Time, time and space/
Never know who you can meet/
Sweep you off your own feet/
You could live in your shoes/
Or fly out into the street/
Free, free from chains/
Time, time and space
Finally, a break in the clouds. But any respite is temporary: by the end of the song, the sense of desperation and defeat in AlRoy’s haunting vocals lingers beyond Keating’s surprisingly jaunty, Gilmouresque solo The cd concludes with two covers. The first is a brilliant reinterpretation of Helter Skelter that recasts the old proto-metal warhorse as a drunkenly seductive after-hours torch song, followed by a solo acoustic version of the old pop standard You Belong to Me. The album isn’t perfect. I wish it opened with the second track instead of the first because that song packs such a punch. I could do without the he’s-such-a-bad-boy-but-I-still-can’t-resist-him ballad He’s Amazing, which reprises a theme that’s been done to death by a gazillion chick singers.
But considering the competition – AlRoy doesn’t have much - Gorgeous Enormous is aptly titled. Fans of Aimee Mann, Jenifer Jackson, and Neko Case will love this cd, and though any resemblance to Blue by Joni Mitchell is thematic rather than musical, it makes a great companion piece.

- Alan Young, Trifectagram