Sallie Ford’s first full length release heralds yet another album of ups and downs, good and bad, for Bowlegs. Unusually the first two tracks are the low point in this release. Sallie Ford rages against the modern music industry, screaming: “What have these people done to music?” on first track I Swear in a defiantly ‘un-ordinary’ vocal tone. This is the problem with writing songs complaining about mainstream music – we can’t help but wince slightly at that angle. It’s an age old indie argument and if you’re going to be writing about the lack of good music you better have the ideas yourself to back it up. On her website Sallie claims that as a child “I preferred to be the weird one.” We can believe that here at Bowlegs, but just being weird isn’t enough, is it?

Something changes from track three. The weirdness that seemed contrived thirty-seconds ago starts to grow on you. Sallie’s unique voice grates on us less and comes to mean more. She isn’t too pitch accurate – the raw recording style and retro aesthetic would definitely not allow for auto-tune, but she pulls off the Judy Garland trick of performance over precision every time.

The style and instrumentation is straightforward swing/blues – a full-on retro approach no less – but the later tracks put a different slant on the scene. For example, the spooky vocals on Poison Milk really grab us. The tracks with more stark arrangement have a raw quality that suits Sallie’s abrasive voice better, such as the loose, grave march Against the Law. By the time we got to Thirteen Years Old we’d done a U-turn – totally moved at the story of losing your Dad at thirteen, singing along: “Why … I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t cry…”

You can’t argue that this album doesn’t have power, though it should be noted that if you are too aggressively retro, you can alienate your audience, and mask a bright talent. These guys should bring in more outside influence to take their rootsy approach to new heights.

-Megan Clifton-