The Roches - Moonswept (CD)

All Music Guide

It's all in the chord of voices. Right, "chord." The imprint the Roches brought to popular music when they issued their selftitled debut in 1979 was as three voices forming a chord rather than as a lead vocalist with backing. The emotional quality in the grain of that chord has been a trademark for the group, but more than this is the poetic unspeakable notion of how all of everyday life with its losses, loves, noble aspirations, and petty resentments exists in the space between those voices, resulting in an authenticity that is utterly seductive in its warmth, quark strangeness, and mysterious charm. After ten albums together, the trio took an 11year hiatus to become individuals again, "normal" people they performed as duos (Maggie and Suzzy) and various solos (Terre and Suzzy) during that time. (Maggie and Suzzy recorded the brilliant Zero Church album in 2002, and Terre recorded a finely wrought solo album and wrote John Kerry's campaign song.) The Roches come back together on Mo...onswept, which brings the chord of those voices back into popular culture again. While you may not have noticed they were gone, you missed them anyway. For all its immediate recognizable quality as a Roches record it's immediate and unmistakable there are key differences, too. The Roches chose to play almost all the instruments themselves this time out with the exception of percussion, some guitars, and "heart strings" by Stewart Lerman, who coproduced the album with the trio, and some piano by Terre's partner, Garry Dial. Oh, and there's a vocal solo by Lucy Wainwright Roche Suzzy's daughter on "Long Before," which she authored. By the quality of the written and sung performance registered here by Lucy, perhaps the group will someday become a quartet. The album begins audaciously enough with "Us Little Kids," a shuffling slow rock tune by Suzzy. It sounds like a tome to a lost love and it is, but of a different kind because there's too much innocence in it. This is a song about childhood and its regrets and trying to seesaw alone. Terre's unabashed folksy paean to love self and collective (it's a very Buddhist song) creates possibilities for this violent world to pass away and become something else: "Did you ever ask yourself how did we get here/Floating on a sea of sorrow/Nothing else is clear...When the day is over/And you put down your plow/Only love can save you/And only you know how." "No Shoes" is one of two wonderful tunes by a friend of the sisters named "Paranoid Larry." It's got that rondelet quality that the three engage in with one another with fine highspirited guitars in a bluesy swing style. It's one of the funniest songs about gratitude ever Paranoid Larry also wrote the album's closer, "Jesus Shaves," which is funny but all but irreverent. Like the songs on Rickie Lee Jones' Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, it places Christ inside the current era as a man who finds work, loses work, finds better work, and knows what it's like to be both misunderstood and received for who he is. Read more Less