By Darryl Cater

Picture Allison Moyet with an acoustic guitar and an aggressively funky pop-rock band. Astra Kelly has a great big, throaty voice with the sort of rasp and beltability one might expect from a big-boned woman with thirty to forty years  of chain-smoking and vocal excersises under her belt.

Kelly, however, is in actuality a relatively petite 26-year-old with a couple of important formative years spent practicing in the subways of Chicago. She undoubtedly fared quite well in the competition with the screeching and rumbling CTA trains. Kelly also collected two years of formal vocal training, in both jazz and classical music. Her limber scale-hopping shows the jazz training. Her attitude and saucy harmonies show her love for R&B vocal gymnasts like, perhaps, Lauren Hill. Her raw bluesy blasting shows an a similar sensibility to Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes.

Oddly, her engineers and co-producers, Gerey Johnson and Jerry Dornbusch, have undermiked her vocals somewhat. Perhaps they were hoping not to drown out the capable jamming of her backing group, Far Rockaway (a name which sounds irksomely kitschy until one discovers it's borrowed from one of Henry Miller's unruly prosaic tangents in Tropic of Capricorn). Far Rockaway handles groove and buzz with equal panache, blending many influences from African American music in the last three decades with a caucasion pop finish. But their contribution is not the highlight of the album, and Kelly's voice gets lost in the ill-conceived mix.

It is not a coincidence that some of the best tracks on the album are
engineered not by Dornbusch and Johnson, but by Neil Gustafson, a jazz soundboard magician who has worked with Liquid Soul. "Use It" is a catchy, Hill-esque rough-and-tumble dance tune. "Beautiful" slips from melodic acoustics to grunge grandiosity. Kelly's vocals get less lost in all three of Gustafson's tracks.

Like her raspy vocals, Kelly's potential is still somewhat raw. At this point in her career, she could use either more vocal coaching or more studio magic to gloss over the occasional glitches in her brilliantly gifted deliveries. Meanwhile, her lyrics attempt profundity while falling too often on earnest cliches. She's more successful when she concentrates less on deep meaning and more on deep grooves. In "Use It," for example, Kelly stops trying to wrap the melodies around wordy platitudes, and lets the tune breathe and swagger.

Nonetheless, if the big label scouts aren't watching Astra Kelly concerts yet, they soon will be. She just needs to keep turning out great moments like the extended jam in "The Key," which slides seamlessly from her ballsy skat to Clint Filichia's rap, and back again.


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