John Benninghouse wrote this review.
Shine Cherries are a trio from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are kindred spirits with the more well-known Handsome Family. Both groups play Americana filtered through a rock music sensibility. But whereas The Handsome Family take existential despair head-on and make a post-modern lemonade, Shine Cherries are more self-effacing as they tend to approach the melancholic more cautiously. This is not to say that they don’t confront it, because they do. Rather, I mean that they embrace the melancholy without dissecting and reducing it.
Weighing in at just over 30 minutes, Shine Cherries is more an EP than an album. The six songs do, however, give a good estimate of their approach. The opener “Palm of Your Hand” is the aural equivalent of rice paper with Michelle Collins’ waif-like voice front and center. It’s a beautiful song that makes you feel as though you’re floating on a soft desert breeze and reminded me of Ryan Adams’s more tender moments with Whiskeytown. This delicate sense becomes muddled just a bit once you realize that Collins has taken a page out of the Michael Stipe playbook with her words being all but indistinguishable. “Fight or Flight” leans towards more traditional country musically and lyrically. It opens with “It’s so sad to hear you say/that what I long for won’t come my way,” and from there Collins gives her vocal chords a bit more of workout while Jeffrey Richards’ lilting banjo churns underneath.
The next couple of songs bring Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt to mind. “Mosquito” burns slowly and its muscular, fuzzy guitars are reminiscent of what the Tupes did to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Effigy.” “Atmosphere” finds bassist Johnny Cassidy adding his voice to the mix as well, plus there are the lonely keys of a piano lingering in the background. The song stands out with its spacey, echoing feedback that made me think of the song of the same name from Son Volt’s Okemah and the Melody of Riot. “You Wouldn’t Dare” picks up the pace, but only just. The rimshots at the beginning of the song give it a vaguely contemporary country sound but it doesn’t last. However, most of Collins’ vocals are understandable here. “Destiny” is the final six minutes of somberness.
After repeated listenings, I’m ambivalent about Shine Cherries. There’s nothing particularly bad here and there are some good melodies to be had. On the down side, it wavers between lugubrious and doleful and there’s not much space between the two. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the songs didn’t seem to trudge along at the same slow pace. Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois were able to give Wrecking Ball a similar feel but did so via a different route. Harris’ world-weary vocals anchored that affair. The music could go off waltzing but her singing kept the songs rooted in the same field. Shine Cherries has a passionate core but it’s not allowed to wander the field. Instead the songs all feel rooted to the same patch of dirt.
(Little Kiss, 2003)
