In her early days Shannon Wright was a drifter, restlessly wandering
from place to place, her musical place in such peripatetic livin'-life
being the-girl-with-the-acoustic-guitar, brusquely busking through
numbers that courted prettiness but weren't anywhere near diffident
enough to pull it off. As she once drifted, so too did it take a while
for Wright to find and define her own artistry, to uncover and discover
the musical tone that was innate to her and her voice, before, then,
fashioning such aesthetic qualities into something whose musical quality
matched that. By her third album, Dyed in the Wool, it seemed like
Wright had finally found upon such sound. On that record, her lusty
strum-and-wail was converted to something much more vital, almost
punk-rock in its approach, with Wright belting out electrified tunes
with brevity and volume. Her newly-issued fourth album, Over the Sun,
finds Wright working with a similar intensity and spirit, only, this
time, drawing such an approach out over longer, stronger, more
emotionally-wrought tunes; the songs herein seem grand in their
scope, even though they're usually only guitars/drums. Using wholly
electric tone, Wright plays aggressive, percussive guitar parts that're
multitracked on top of each other, the songsmith fashioning
pseudo-basslines from staccato single notes she picks with a
viciousness. With Victory at Sea/Mary Timony drummer Christina Files
belting belligerently on the drums, Wright drags out her songs into
angst-ridden epics, digging into something deeper and darker, her
vicious vocals and sharpened guitars marching deep into this darkness,
Wright full of belligerent bile as she stalks her demons down a shadowy
path. As we undertake this slow descent into hellish fury, you get the
feeling that the demons she chases are those of a woman scorned, the
album culminating in a couple of cuts where — amongst morbid guitars
casting angular, distorted shadows — Wright's weeping and wailing is
letting loose lyrical haranguing. In "If Only We Could," as she evokes
desolate environs that we're to take to be a social scene, Wright
dramatically depicts the to-and-fro ambivalence of a feuding lover,
spitting such choice salvos as "You better watch what you say/ You might
just find your words have no worth/ You sit in your miserable lie/ Better
stay with yours and I'll stay with mine" at the same time as the refrain
sees that things could be better "If only we could just leave from this
place," only for the despondent coda to mourn "Such a mistake/ To spend
time on you." In "Plea," the jagged guitars seem even more vicious, and
Wright's sharpened lyrics themselves take on a more pointed quality, the
songsmith closing the song on song, singing: "Your love is a forgery/ A
mockingbird to mimic through me/ And these eyes they will not
recover/ Your eyes they have turned to black/ Turned to black/ Turned to
black/ Turned to black."
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