Kathy Cashel "The Question is Yes" CD
[Exotic Fever]
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's basically solo acoustic material with a few guest appearances on added vocals or instrumentation, and it ranges from fairly somber personal material to political excursions. The softer songs that are based more around straight acoustic guitar and vocals are pretty cool. The sound is solid, the vocals are really well delivered with a few simple harmony lines, etc. But most of the songs are really short and work surprisingly well considering, though some of the longer pieces definitely feel more developed. "Antibiotics" is a little more upbeat and catchy musically and has almost the same chord progression as Tommy Tutone's "Jenny (867-5309)" (no kidding), which is far different than the other songs. "Suburbs' End" is by far the darkest track, with more somber guitar parts and subdued singing, as well as a few added layers of sort of droning instrumentation that are hard to make out. Vocally, though, this is where the material definitely shines and gets more emotional. I'm sort of not into some of the added instruments, so I think a truly stripped down approach would almost benefit some of this stuff. "Eat Your Heart Out", for example, is more of a "fun" sounding track in some ways (musically, but not the subject matter), and I don't like it at all since it clashes with the other songs big time. The layout is mostly simple little snapshot styled photographs with minimal credit text and all of the lyrics along the inner panels. Lyrically most of the songs seem personal, with a few taking a staunch political stance against greed and violence and their role in the current state of the world, so things roll from simple lines like, "There's no point in crying over what went wrong a long time ago..." to, "Our righteous anger will leave them overwhelmed, we'll save our empire from the great unwashed. But every road would lead to no choice at all..." This is not the kind of thing I normally listen to, and it's pushing it for me to appreciate the CD as a whole, but there are some really good individual songs. The variety is kind of a tossup as most of it's not that strong in my opinion, sans the catchiness in "Antibiotics", so I think a more consistently morose delivery would work far better, but that's speaking more to my personal tastes than anything I suppose. I'm really picky, so I'm kind of being hard on this CD, but I think her voice and the more minimalist guitar playing is quite nice nonetheless. (5/10)
Running time - 28:24, Tracks: 10
[Notable tracks: Antibiotics, Suburbs' End]
Exotic Fever Records - http://www.exoticfever.com

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