Sherry Rich deserves to be a big alt-country star with major league talents akin to such luminaries as Lucinda Williams, Aimee Mann, or Maria McKee. She pens stellar autobiographical lyrics about longhaired user boyfriends (“Is That All You Wanted”), her disdain for wasteful self-destruction (“Beautiful, Talented, And Dead”) and intimate details about love’s labor lost (“the way you laughed when you took off my shoes”) as well as the joys of being footloose and fancy free (“just two white dogs, the open road and me”). The shoulda-been hit here is “Polite Kisses,” a radio-friendly ditty that also happens to be a four-on-the-floor horny catcall.
Sherry Rich is a veteran of an all-girl Melbourne band called Girl Monstar that supported the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, and Skid Row. The shame of this particular release is that her backing band (Wilco minus Jeff Tweedy) recorded this awhile ago with hopes of commercial country airplay. Hence, the instrumentation and overall production is distractingly bland, glossy and sterile. (They do have the good taste to cover Badfinger’s “I’ll Be The One.”) Since Sherry’s apparently living in Nash Vegas nowadays, we should be looking forward to hearing more from her. In all, a damned good songwriter who just needs more dirt.
E-mail Dimitri Monroe at [email protected].
