Needle

Songs Your Mother Never Sang You

(self-released)

Record Review by Alexis Roberts

Needle are a male/female duo comprised of Julie Cornett and Steve Beck. They are still relatively under the radar.  Actually, they are pretty far below the radar; believe it or not, this little gem isn’t even signed yet.  Their self-released album Songs Your Mother Never Sang You is folk rock minimalism in its ultimate state of glory. Needle is the poster child for making the “less is more” musical approach work well.

“Lo-fi” is how Needle chooses to describe themselves. Although that is fairly accurate, many people can allow low fidelity to get confused with low quality, and low quality is bad, whereas low fidelity can still be a good thing. Lo-fi is actually a moderately passed-by sub-genre of indie rock dating all the way back to the 1980s (yes, indie rock has been around that long). Originally, and still today, lo-fi bands purposely use recording techniques to give their music that “organic” sound (see: Pavement, Elliott Smith, etc.). I would hate to say that it’s an underproduced album, so perhaps we can just settle upon saying that it is just barely produced enough. It still sounds clean, yet it has a charming hollowness that could only be given by the lack of a producer gone wild.

Julie Cornett’s throat must be lined in suede because her voice comes out so smooth, but still thick and softly textured. Very reminiscent of Jen Charles of The Elysian Fields actually, but with its own distinctive hushed lullaby-like tone. That, combined with the almost vacant instrumental portion of this band, produces this relaxing noir folk music. Steve Beck’s guitar is heavily aided by his distortion pedal on quite a few of the songs, adding a little bit of a shoegazeing ambience to the album.

The album cover simply displays a withered branch of a rose bush. Its sheer simplicity makes it stand out and I feel like that image couldn’t have done a better job describing the music behind it: simple, wintery, mysterious, understated.