Laura Cantrell: Not The Tremblin' Kind : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As the host of the best country radio show in the New York area, the weekly Radio Thrift Shop on WFMU (91.1-FM), Laura Cantrell plays the kind of records - honest and simple, dirty and sweet -- that Nashville used to make. Now she's made one of her own. Cantrell's debut album, Not the Tremblin' Kind, is an austere beauty, a record of such graceful hill-country minimalism -- sturdy acoustic picking, whispered rhythm, tart electric and pedal steel guitar -- that you can hear every ounce of sorrow and steel in Cantrell's strong, direct voice. Against Jon Graboff's mandolin tears in "Two Seconds," she projects the hurt of endless waiting ("Two seconds of your love/Is all I need of you/Two seconds of your time/That's enough to say we're through") with such clarity that you can hear the sound of time running out. As a singer, Cantrell -- who was actually born and raised in Nashville -- is a modern woman with an old-timey heart, with a voice pitched somewhere between the bluesy realism of Lucinda Williams and the vintage femininity of Kitty Wells. And while Cantrell wrote only four of the twelve songs on Tremblin' Kind, she moves through these stories like she's lived them. Her delivery in "The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter" crackles with the electricity of regret ("If I'd quit drinking sooner/I wouldn't have gone that far"). And in her own "Queen of the Coast," Cantrell relates the story of an aging country starlet, looking back on her life of long miles and sacrifice, with a perfect sadness, gentle and candid. On the radio, Cantrell plays country music the way it used to be. On Not the Tremblin' Kind, she sings it the way it oughta be. (RS 860)

DAVID FRICKE