It’s been three years since I saw Seattle’s Zoe Muth and her band the Lost High Rollers at a little festival on the northern Puget Sound. I liked her sound and thought she had a lot of potential. In the meantime, she has apparently moved to Austin, and has taken a major step toward fulfilling that potential with her new album World of Strangers.
Muth (pronounced “myooth”), sings delicious country music in her lightly drawling alto. Her songwriting and singing and the arrangements and playing by her band all have moved to another level since I last encountered them. The 10 songs on this album, whether they’re upbeat shuffles, sad waltzes or scuffling rockers, all tell stories of working-class folks who are nearly as unlucky in love as they are in life.
The first single is “Mama Needs A Margarita, a honky-tonk weeper about a young mom stuck at home with the baby while her husband runs around on her. It’s a perfect little gem of a country song, touching on familiar tropes while managing to sound fresh. Here’s a nifty live in-studio performance of the song:
There’s plenty more where that came from, too. “Make Me Change My Mind” is an uptempo country rocker about a gal whose baby isn’t treating her right, with a knockout dual-guitar instrumental on the bridge. “April Fool” is a beat-heavy shuffle with a Tex-Mex sound abetted by a strong accordion line; it comes complete with a big sing-along chorus, and solos from a twangy slide guitar and a bowed cello (or maybe double-bass) in the middle. “Waltz Of The Wayward Wind” is another sad honky-tonker about rounders and rambling men; it pairs piano and pedal steel in the bridge to good effect. And the album opens with “Little Piece Of History,” a beautiful country song set to a shuffling railroad beat. This uplifting tale of a couple setting out to face the world with nothing but their love is simply arranged with acoustic guitars, some light piano tinling and chiming mandolin accents that made me think of REM at its shiniest, and you can only hope that this happy couple isn’t the one that ends up a few years later with Mama at home hankering for that margarita.
But there’s more than straight country music here. Muth is stretching her wings as a songwriter and coming up with some solid folk ballads, too. Chief among them is “Annabelle,” a pensive portrait of a strong but sad and lonely woman that sounds like it might’ve been written by Iris Dement. And “Somebody I Know,” a quiet plea for love to ease the singer’s loneliness, has a slow folk-gospel groove under its dusty desert soundscape of reverb-laden guitar and tinkling piano. Muth’s delivery of the quietly sung, almost spoken lyrics is right up front and suitably plaintive but not maudlin. I particularly like this bit in the chorus: “Won’t you come and go with me, seeking moonlight and mystery, haunt the hidden places like the embers in the afterglow …”
The album ends with the devastatingly sad love song “What Did You Come Back Here For?” This slow country blues strikes me as the flip side of Slobberbone’s song “Gimme Back My Dog.” In that one, the guy in a busted relationship is forlorn and pissed because his ex has stolen the affection of his canine; it’s a song that’s funny on the surface but hides a deep vein of grief. Muth’s song, on the other hand, wears its grief out front, as the woman in a broken pair resists the return of her ex, knowing that too much water has passed under that particular bridge: “I’ve never been the one to leave, I’ve always been the true believer, for any good that’s ever done …”
Zoe Muth is an understated powerhouse of a country singer and songwriter, and World of Strangers is her best record yet.
(Signature Sounds, 2014)
