Emmylou Harris: Red Dirt Girl

Sadly, the other unusual thing about Red Dirt Girl is that it isn't very enjoyable. It tries to recreate—without Daniel Lanois' master hand—the murky, eerie production that made 1995's Wrecking Ball a success. Producer Malcolm Burn tries and fails to flesh out the instrumentation with drum machines and synthesizers. The washed-out backdrop and mid-tempo beat of almost every song makes the album surprisingly bland; it's the worst of Lilith-pop.

Harris's voice struggles to wrench itself from the insipid instrumentation, but she has written non-existent melodies too low in her range to let her vocals shimmer, and she doesn't make up for it by wailing raggedly as she did to great effect on Wrecking Ball. Some tracks meander aimlessly in search of a hook. Others find Harris writing in an ill-fitting form, resulting in lyrics like, "I could have caused your heart to yield/But I was just a disturbance in the field/Of your dreams." And it would seem hard for Harris to perform with singers who weren't worse than she is, but the adenoidal Dave Matthews is simply wretched on "My Antonia."

There is one bright spot, however. Harris meditates on some "big themes" like death, the divine, and doomed love, and the weirdly elegiac "Michelangelo" pulls off a take on a couple of these. It doesn't try to make sense, but at least it successfully evokes a feeling of loss and destruction. In "Last night I dreamed about you," Harris sings repeatedly over a melancholy, distorted guitar that sounds like it's coming from some subliminal aquarium.

Harris would do better to write with one of her smoking live bands in mind. Her voice never sounds better than when it's floating above a crying steel guitar or belting over a horde of finger-pickers, and she makes the most naïve lyrics sound profound. But without solid musicianship, Red Dirt Girl has the trappings of profundity but errs on the side of banality. (Elektra/Asylum)

—Margaret Meyers

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