Dawn Landes & The Kentuckians, Covers E.P. Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

The love of Americana and the thought the abundance of wide open spaces that are filled with historical beauty, destruction, free thought and in some extreme cases, regretfully closed minds, all make America an appealing place in which to praise the ability of song writing.

The American dream, the chance to improve your lot in life and its downfall when the intensity of its politics bites with severity, is one that provides the thought of a lyric and offers redemption, a softness to the hammer blow when it goes wrong.

To take on a set of songs that show the acute feeling of emotion, whether for good or band and give them, in four of the songs, a female voice rather than the masculine All-American boy tale, is to stand firm against such things and it is an action that so very few seem to want to do. Thankfully there is a Dawn Landes in this world, who, like Tori Amos, is able to blur the boundaries between the feminine and the manly in the Dawn Landes & The Kentuckians Covers E.P.

The five songs that are covered on the E.P. show the image of the All-American, the pride in the highest ideal but overwhelming melancholic bitterness that surrounds Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City, where dreams can come true on the roll of a dice but can be shattered by the time you get down to Benny’s Landing, the charm but also the inwardly judgemental anti-class thought defines a person by the way they speak in Tom Petty’s Southern Accents and the elegantly serene heart pounding beauty of Henry Mancini’s Moon River, artistically one of the finest songs ever written, are all given the female voice that counteracts the musk driven insecurity and allows the songs to take on more weight.

Even in the two odd songs on the E.P. Roxy Music’s More Than This, quintessentially British and Dolly Parton’s Longer Than Always, a song that is so overwhelmingly upbeat despite the hidden nature of a woman trying to explain that what they have is more than a measure of the physical, that some things last longer than mere sex, the sense of Americana is rife.

It is a measure of self confidence that allows a musician to be able to take on a song of such legacy and be able to turn the screw upon them so well that the listener has no choice but to re-evaluate what a song might mean. In Dawn Landes & The Kentuckians, that hurdle of thought is cleared with the grace of the Mississippi rolling through the countryside and the raging feminine heart that whispers with controlled expression of anger.

Stirring stuff.

Ian D. Hall