Beauty is the beast in Miss Alans' dull sparkler

By Jessica Winter

THE MISS ALANS

Ledger (World Domination)

Ledger, the CD package, is beautiful. It is all but gift-wrapped for its purchaser, the disc nestled under folding layers of textured, gold-and-green-inked soft cardboard. Crafted by Independent Project Press, who have also designed recent releases for Tortoise, Rachel's, and June of '44, Ledger evokes an odd, sourceless nostalgia; if CDs had been around during the time between the two World Wars, one imagines they would have been packaged just like this.

Ledger, the new collection of songs by the Miss Alans, is more problematic. And ironically, pretty packaging--this time in the sonic sense--is its major undoing. Manny Diez's guitars, though mostly amiable, occasionally rumble and squall, and Scott Oliver's hoarse, gnarled voice takes a stab at real menace once in a while, but the album's production shimmers and sparkles too much for the darker songs to achieve anything greater than the Better-than-Ezra-like paroxyms of Adult Alternative Airplay angst.

This might not trouble the Miss Alans--a quartet named for the pair of itinerant spinster sisters in E. M. Forster's A Room With a View--at all. The multi-layered acoustic guitars and pedal steel, listless drumming, and quasi-wistful vocals of the mid-tempo, C-chord-ridden "Sparkler Queen" are the calling cards of a Gin Blossom, and though Oliver sounds just like former Pogue Shane McGowan on the Irish dirge "Samantha" (elsewhere he does a mean impression of the guy from the Psychedelic Furs), the song doesn't at all sound drunk or punchy, and maybe it should. The Miss Alans could stand to get a little sloppy, a
little ornery; as dear Shane knows so well, a good bar fight can enliven any staid modern-rock affair.

As can solid guitar work, and the Miss Alans' Diez has got chops. He makes the fleet-footed melody line of "Sheen" dance nimbly in and out of synchrony with Oliver's torpid vocalizing, while his slinky, sweaty, sexy guitars cast torrid glances and flirt madly with each other in "Candy Apple." But they don't get enough time to really get it on, here or elsewhere; few of these songs pass the three-minute mark. Yeah, fine, guitar solos are passé, but the Miss Alans might as well showcase their star amidst Oliver's wheezy emoting, Ron Woods' wimpy drumming, and Jay Fung's irrelevant bass. Only on "Summertime" does Diez let himself stretch out a bit, spinning out melodic variation past a verse-chorus-verse framework, with lovely results: his work here has the fresh-scrubbed, bright-eyed clarity of Kristin Hersh's best acoustic
stuff, and lifts the song above Oliver's plodding, lifeless delivery.

The Miss Alans should strike us like an unhoned but promising bar band; instead, their sound is all dressed up for the A & R man. If the band allows Diez a little more leverage, and if Oliver can infuse a little anger or pathos into his moping croak of a voice, then maybe we'll be able to discern
their future songs from current AAA fare. Hopefully, upon their next release, the only thing pretty about the Miss Alans will be the jewel box.

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