Grand
Erin McKeown's third album is to be commended for its sense of adventure. There are 14 tracks onGrandand they encompass at least that number of musical styles, among them winsome indie-pop, gentle country-rock, lushly orchestrated barrel-organ stompery and pretty electronica that verges on trip-hop. When trying to frame McKeown in terms of other artists, you end up with an equally impressively diverse peer group: Tanya Donelly, Rickie Lee Jones, Bjork, Liquorice and Shivaree (with whom McKeown shares a drummer, George Javori).An album this stylistically promiscuous needs a fairly imposing central personality to hold it all together, and McKeown just about manages on this score, as well. Her voice, while somewhat cutesy and cloying, never becomes overbearingly so--it's at its best on a lovely version of the Judy Garland standard "Lucky Day"--and she's an engaging narrator of her tales. There aren't enough songwriters to whom it would occur to write a song in the form of a letter from Igor Stravinsky, holed up in Hollywood in the 1940s while he waited in vain for Dylan Thomas to recover from tuberculosis so the pair could write an opera together.--Andrew Mueller