February 23, 2004

NEW CD'S: Eerie Tunes From the Holler
By BEN RATLIFF

POT LIQUOR
Angel Dean & Sue Garner

In the 80's Angel Dean and Sue Garner were the singers in a jolly, rough-edged New York country-music quartet, the Last Roundup. It was a band with acoustic guitars, steel guitar, bass and no drummer, and their voices closely harmonized over weepers and honky-tonk and Carter Family-style songs.

The first track on "Pot Liquor" (Diesel Only Records), the singers' first collaboration since those days, indicates a return to that kind of sound. But it is just a quick taste of nostalgia. Thereafter the rest of "Pot Liquor" veers into completely different territory, an imaginative, spooky but restful pop-folk. Most songs have been written by Ms. Dean with her husband, Jonathan Thomas, a horror-fiction writer.

This is reflective, settled music, even if it has the casual stamp of the home studio; you can hear patience and experience through it. (Some of the lyrics, in "Dreams" and "Wider World," deal metaphorically with innocence and experience.) And the singers seem freer in their decisions. Where the Last Roundup's songs were immersed in an established genre, this music does what it wants.

Part of this album's breadth has to do with its long list of collaborators. Even when the song form is the standard folk ballad, this is a record of many little extra touches: a bass harmonica drone here, a distorted electric guitar solo there, an organ sound looming up in the back of the mix. And while they still use their bright, cutting voices in crisscrossing harmonies, they've also learned to pull away from each other: sometimes Ms. Dean sings narrative lyrics and Ms. Garner sings wordless, airy counterlines.

Those lyrics create their own gothic world of forests, deserts, quarry ponds and barn attics; creatures both real and imaginary populate these realms. The general mood may have something to do with old mountain-music songs of desolation, but this version is more overgrown and literary.