Speck Mountain - Some Sweet Relief [2009][EAC,log,cue FLAC]

Artist: Speck Mountain
Release: Some Sweet Relief
Discogs: 1896533
Released: 2009
Label: Carrot Top Records
Catalog#: saki 046lp / saki046cd
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Style: Folk, World, & Country,

Tracklisting:

01. Shame On The Soul
02. Fidelity Shake
03. Angela
04. I Feel Eternal
05. Some Sweet Relief
06. Backslider
07. Backsliding
08. Twinlines
09. Sister Water

It would take a hard heart not to feel some sympathy for Marie-Claire Balabanian and Karl Briedrick, who say they were "severely depressed, lonely and desperate" when they started recording their second album as Speck Mountain. Even so, did they have to wallow quite as much? Some Sweet Relief is adrift in a sea of despondency, Balabanian's drawling vocals listless with discontent, the repetitive guitar lines striving for a Spiritualized-style hypnotism, but languishing instead in monotony. Nor do the lyrics offer much drama, for all the lapses into cinematic cliche, the black nights, lost highways and dreams of escape. On Angela, the duo attempt something more elemental, with Balabanian sighing the name over a plaintive melody, but the numbed sound merely proves stupefying. It's typical of an album that evokes an unfortunate evening spent cornered in a bar by a drunk who insists on recounting, in minute detail, a humdrum sexual history.