Cortney Tidwell reviewed
Cortney Tidwell
Don’t Let The Stars Keep Us Tangled Up
(Ever)
Growing up in the heart of country music territory had such an effect on Cortney Tidwell she has ignored it completely on her debut album.
While her voice — criss-crossing the album in a dizzying overdub siege — is the prominent instrument on Don’t Let The Stars Keep Us Tangled Up, organics is not the name of the game. Stars is like Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain: haunted, digitally whimsical, and ultimately bereft of earthly pleasures. It’s also a reminder of why Goldfrapp shifted her motif to grinding her hips on the dancefloor — she needed to feel. Tidwell marshalls her album like a delirious dream after an evening spent bingeing on David Lynch movies, and has unhinged herself completely. The trouble with this approach is it never allows her to gain a toehold on the imagination before escaping into the ether. What’s left — outside of the tingling “Our Time” — are REM-reverie scraps, unrelated dreamlets that have little impact.
— Kevin Keegan
