Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The second CD from Texas country-rock quintet Knife in the Water has a pensive, 3 a.m. quality. The opening track, "Watch Your Back," sets the tone. It starts with a slightly ominous-sounding, urgent guitar strum and some rather un-Nashville vocal harmonies, which then settle into a slow song with a slightly paranoid lyrical theme. Aaron Blount and Laura Krause's voices wrap around one another lazily, and Bill McCullough's pedal steel sweetens the spartan instrumental arrangement. Most of the songs are quiet and a bit somber, but there are a few more uptempo numbers. Among those are "Rene," a murder ballad supported by a chugging snare drum pattern played with brushes (a song where it's not clear if the whole thing is a setup for the punch line "faceless body in a topless bar"), "Young Blood in the River" (another cheerful ditty about the murder of a transvestite hooker), built on a pair of nicely crunchy acoustic rhythm guitar riffs, and a version of Lee Hazlewood's "Sundown, Sundown." On the slower end, "Promenade" and "Party" have a subtle beauty that sneaks up on you (the lyrical theme of both is still rather bleak--drugs instead of death). To place them on the contemporary music spectrum, loosely speaking, the quintet's music is closer to Palace than to alt-country types such as Son Volt. At times, they strikingly resemble Seattle's Walkabouts, whose fans would be well advised to check out Red River. --Bob Bannister
Red River,Knife in the Water,Overcoat Recordings,Alternative Country-Rock,Indie Rock,Pop,Rock,Rock/Pop
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