Maria Taylor - Lynn Teeter Flower

Genre rock Publisher Saddle Creek Records External Links Official Maria Taylor Website Official Saddle Creek Website Maria Taylor - "A Good Start" MP3 Maria Taylor - "Lost Time" MP3

Maria Taylor is one-half of slightly irritating Omaha group Azure Ray, so I felt it within my rights to assume that this album would only be one-half as annoying as any given Azure Ray album. Right? Nuh-uh, sorry to say. Lynn Teeter Flower is brimming over with po-faced acoustic strumming, cloying multi-tracked backing vocals that are making Elliott Smith spin in his grave right now, and songs-of-experience lyrics that lack only actual experience to make them believable. The whole sorry enterprise is capped with Taylor's coy, much-too-breathy vocals. When she whispers "honey" or "baby" in an effort to establish a connection, she just sounds condescending. It's even worse when she shoehorns a fifty-cent word like "compromise" into one of her talk-singing non-jams.

Of course, with things Saddle Creek-related, I have to check to make sure things are as bad as I think. And in fact there are some small mercies here, like a genuinely affecting bit of twang on "Small Part of Me," the loose-limbed Spoon pastiche of "Replay," or the found voices on the title track. "Lynn Teeter Flower," the song, contains more genuine emotion in one minute than Lynn Teeter Flower, the album, does in its entirety. The folk path may not be for everyone; what puzzles me is why a genre that places such importance on having something to say attracts so many musicians with nothing to say.

Maria Taylor - "Xanax" Video