There's hurt and rage in every resolute syllable Martha Wainwright liberates from her pain. It's a scratched, scarred voice, one that pleads, on the very first track, "I have no reason to be alive. Oh give me one."
That's verbatim there.
In other words, Wainwright's self-titled debut album (well, debut full-length) isn't quite beach volleyball Muzak. It's intimate folk with a deceptively quiet sound, though one that's neither unique nor all too alluring.
But what's made the twenty-something Wainwright so alluring to the press, perhaps, is her rock 'n' roll pedigree. Yes, she's the daughter of Loudon Wainwright III; yes, she's the sister of Rufus Wainwright the Gorgeous (who lends his equally magnetic vocals to "The Maker").
Sofia Coppola and Kate Hudson aside, genetics don't always breed talent. It's not that Martha Wainwright is untalented. It's more that her woeful, wounded approach to singer-songwriting doesn't hold up to all the truly, beautifully bizarre stuff going down in the freak-folk movement and neo-folk in general. Joanna Newsom, she ain't.
At best, Wainwright is Cat Power minus the visceral intensity, or a morosely bitter Joni Mitchell if she came from a family even more messed up than The Royal Tenenbaums.
Those comparisons aren't too shabby though. If the most acerbic comment I can come up with is "a more boring guitar-rather-than-piano Chan Marshall," then Martha Wainwright isn't about to go down with Jennifer Love Hewitt as someone who should seriously reconsider her career choice.
On each of the album's 13 tracks, Wainwright's fragile acoustic guitar quivers under the weight of her bottomless agony and echoing loneliness and scorned-woman wrath that's less Alanis Morissette and more, well, Cat Power minus that previously mentioned visceral intensity.
How's this for an example? The album's most optimistic lines, which pop up in the pretty but forgettable "This Life," are these: "This life is boring. This life right now is snoring, but that's alright, it's okay. It's still worth living. When it is not, I got the gun for my head."
Certainly not the most clever lyricist in the world. But she is an effective, acute, honest and pithy one at that.
Wainwright's at her most effective and affecting, though, when she transgresses her anguish and moves into the realm of self-assured, beautifully mesmeric anger. With "Bloody Mother F------ A------" -- a lash-out against her father, and the album's indisputable triumph -- Wainwright finds herself in control of a song that'll make you weep on the first listen and weep more on the 30th (if you're the weeping kind, that is).
Wainwright purrs, whispers and wails, "I wish, I wish I was born a man so I could learn how to stand up for myself, like those guys with guitars I've been watching in bars" -- her dejection slowly breaking into a shattered but transcendent declaration that she's through pretending to be OK for the sake of anyone or anything but truth. Wonder how many hundreds of dollars and hours on the sofa that assertion took.
The entire album, in fact, plays out as a cathartic release, with Wainwright letting her listeners into the innermost shadows of her sorrow. I just wish her music were as compelling and enthralling as her emotions.
-- Reviewed by Caralyn Green
