| The tail end of Julie Frost's new CD The
Wave features a snippet of the big-voiced potential pop star speaking to a coffee
house audience somewhere in a waifish wisp of a girlish voice, complete with ingratiating
giggle and nary a hint of attitude. The rest of the album makes it clear her singing voice
is something altogether different.
Four seconds into the first track, Frost lets
loose with some commanding, willful minor key scat over a slickly creative modern pop
arrangement: the restrained power of Jewel meets the willful verve of Fiona Apple. As the
album progresses, Frost's assured vocals also encompass the sunny kindness of Natalie
Merchant and the heavy husk of Joan Osborne.
The record introduces two extremely hot talents:
Frost and her producer, Danny Shaffer. The pair has made a sleek, polished record whose
only serious fault is the degree of its success in mimicking the gold-selling modern pop
divas of our era.
Frost is already benefiting from music biz buzz,
receiving multiple invitations to perform in The Songwriter Hall of Fame's New York
showcases, gushing recommendations from Chicago radio guru Richard Milne of WXRT, and high
ratings from web surfers who frequent Broadbandtalent.com.
The most serious accusation one can legitimately
hurl is that her new CD is very derivative. The Wave (and its accompanying press
materials) actually seem to court comparisons to the brawny babes of 21st
century radio. There are some terrific unusual sounds on the record (check out the strings
on "Life After You," which hum and halt as though the cello and violins were
being pumped like a concertina). But Shaffer's brand of creativity is unabashedly similar
to the sort of creativity pioneered by producer Jon Brion on Fiona Apple's When the
Pawn…
The songwriting could be more original as well.
Frost's "Pretty Girl," for instance, is virtually identical in theme and imagery
to Ani DiFranco's "Not a Pretty Girl" (Frost: "You can save me if you
choose. A push-up bra and platform shoes / A pretty girl could handle this / A pretty girl
would make it all go away." DiFranco: "I am not a pretty girl / and I don’t
need to be rescued / I am no damsel in distress / and I don't need to be rescued."
Frost: "I never was the kind to hold a grudge." DiFranco: "I am not an
angry girl, but it seems I have everyone fooled").
Still, if you can shake the unpleasant feeling
of déjà vu, you'll be rewarded: Shaffer and Frost pull off the imitation with enough
polish and enough new ideas to make the experience a very worthwhile listen. Frost writes
snappy, memorable songs worthy of her big vocal talent, and Shaffer ably combines intimate
singer-songwriter acoustics with smart novelty, employing driving percussion, grumbling
guitars and atmospheric keyboards.
"Candy" reminds one of the husky
counter-intuitive melodies of David Rice. Other songs back Frost's booming voice with
Patty Griffin-esque rock ("The Wave") or mellow Merchant MOR
("Raindrops").
Frost's greatest gift as a songwriter lies less
in her ability to write insightful, meaningful or clever lyrics and more in her ability to
wrap simple thoughts into tight rhythmic packages. Read the lyrics as prose on the page
and it's not easy to keep your eyes from glazing, but the tight syncopation of syllables
make the lines sparkle:
| "I |
watch |
you |
go |
| Where
are you going? You look like you know. |
| You're |
hoping |
to
see |
| What? |
|
|
|
| The size |
|
|
|
Of the shape |
|
|
Of the look |
|
|
Of your life after me." |
Fun stuff, even if it is a trick she's
picked up from Fiona Apple. I realize the ice of musical comparison can be thin, and
female vocalists with little in common are too often lumped together by rock critics on no
reasonable ground other than their femininity. When Tracy Chapman, Sam Phillips and
Melissa Etheridge, for example, all appeared at the end of the 1980s, many rock writers
seemed unable to hear the massive differences between the trio. So I feel obligated to
emphasize that Frost is much closer to her contemporaries than Chapman, Phillips and
Etheridge were to one another.
But if Frost isn't yet wholly an original, the
album gives ample reason to believe she soon will be.
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