Adrienne Young reviewed
Adrienne Young
Room To Grow
(Addie Belle)
Socialist acoustic punk bands, ever lacking in foresight, completely missed out on a definitive genre tag. Instead comes eco-friendly Adrienne Young who, by packaging seeds with albums and donating proceeds to soil-nourishing causes, deserves the title of the first agri rocker.
Hoping the attention afforded her activism doesn’t drown her musical voice, Young’s Room To Grow makes good on its title and finds her settling in a little. Her hearty folk rock, sometimes accompanied by Will Kimbrough or Phish’s Mike Gordon, is often nettlesome at best, but surprisingly she’s much more destabilizing with her cunning. The album leads off with the line “It’s just one more day out of my life,” but she cracks her tough façade by repeating “gone for good, gone for good.” It adds an immediacy to an aesthetically non-jarring folk rock party, which then falls further from the sweet, singer-songwriter nest by launching into a four-minute instrumental. By this time it’s clear Young is going to have her way with Room To Grow, touching on post-9/11 disquietude on “How Is This World Better Now” and following it up with the classic country duet tones of “Once More.”
— Steve Forstneger
