Twilight Hotel

Review: Americana UK

9 out of 10

Highway Prayer, the second album from Canada’s first couple of alt-retro-countrified folk is full of splendid love tokens and mysteriously menacing stories. The perky opening mission statement of viva la vinyl doesn’t quite set the tone for the doomier sensitivities of the rest of the (long) record. There’s hints of a classic 1950s/ early 60s melody and sound, made fully modern by the his and hers voices, both of which have a little something unique. They work together well, as on ‘Impatient love’, a song George and Tammy might have covered on a peaceful day.

The temptation of working with your lover must be to fill an album with confessional love songs, but the personal is counterbalanced with a political and social conscious, most notably on the somewhat overlong and Ricky Valance-ish misery of “the Ballad of Salvador and Isabelle” and on Slumber Queen.

This is a fine, exciting record.

Review of Highway Prayer, Americana UK, 02/16/2008