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WHY THE LONG FACE
(Red House)
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The Roches — now the duo of Maggie and Suzzy (sister Terre has formed her own group) — have a long history of making music that is kooky and dead earnest, humorous and melancholy, bohemian and more than just a little sentimental. Why the Long Face is yet one more curious addition to their quirky canon. At times political ("For Those Whose Work Is Invisible"), at others gut-wrenching ("I Don’t Have You"), the album at first seems like a hodge-podge. But a closer listen reveals that it is, as Suzzy calls it, about the ever-thinning line between opposites. "Who Cares" is rife with ambivalence: "I think that I’m a dove/But maybe I’m a hawk/Someday I will fly away." In "The Long Lonely Road to Nowhere," Suzzy sings that, after having read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, she is "exactly the opposite of who I should be." But no two ways about it, the soul of Why the Long Face belongs to the Roches’ affecting voices, which are as pure and as rich as the Everlys’. Even when they go deliberately wonky — as on the atonal moments of "One Season," a redux of a track from 1980’s Nurds — there’s always a sublime majesty about the sound they create.
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