Records: Mary Lou Lord's Got No Shadow

By Meredith Gordon

Lord spent nine years singing and playing guitar in the subway stations of Boston and London, covering other people's songs and providing background music as accompaniment to every working-man's daily commute. This CD is just that: background music. With sweet, sappy lyrics about heartbreak and love sung in a breathy girlie voice, humm-y, strumm-y melodies, and 13 formulaic verse-chorus-verse songs, Lord has produced an undeniably inoffensive album with a lot of indistinct original tracks and a few decently-done covers of songs that were better sung by their original performers.

Got No Shadow is Lord's third album, released January 1998 on mega-music-mothership Sony's slightly smaller subsidiary label, W.O.R.K. Her previous two albums were released on the indie label Kill Rock Stars, but it seems Lord decided that a derivative pop album belongs on a decidedly non-independent label. Works for me.

Lord appears to be a singer of at least decent quality, but the tracks on Got No Shadow do little to challenge her voice or expressive capabilities. In fact, there is little on the album that challenges anything at all--lyrically, musically, or conceptually. It sounds a lot like Lisa Loeb, minus the cat-eye glasses and with three or four lumps of sugar stirred in just for kicks, or a slightly aged Jewel with a couple of extra names. In "His Lamest Flame," Lord laments the loss of a love whose feelings for her have "fade[d] away." In "She Had You," she thinks longingly back on the boy she wanted and never got. In "Subway," she whines about the man she sees while playing who "lives in the suburbs...carries a phone...pitch[es her] a quarter" but never stays around. You get the idea.

There is nothing terribly wrong with Got No Shadow, but there is nothing that great about it either. It is a catchy little record, full of la-la-la lyrics, excessively repetitive choruses, simple drum rhythms, cute high-octave harmony, and angsty longing lost-love themes. If you are a big fan of female-vocal hummable-tune sugar-coated pop then by all means, buy this CD. Or you could just blow the dust off an old Loeb release and pretend she's not wearing glasses--it's just about the same thing. (W.O.R.K.)

Back to A&E...