Record Reviews

case/lang/veirs

Album: “case/lang/veirs”

Grade: B+

Beware the supergroup. When strong-willed solo artists join forces, end results often do not equal, let alone exceed, the sum of their parts.

There’s no working at cross purposes in evidence, however, on this impressively cohesive three-way team-up of Americana-leaning vocalist and songwriters Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs. The unexpected grouping was instigated by lang, the still sumptuous-voiced chanteuse whose career-highlight collaborations include her early cowgirl years with the band Ben Mink, plus pairings with Roy Orbison and Tony Bennett.

This ego-free set opens with “Atomic Number,” with each singer taking a verse, and from there the song’s principal songwriter takes the lead.

Veirs, the least-known and most underrated of the trio (whose husband, Tucker Martine, handles the pleasantly understated production) sings the snappy single “Best Kept Secret.” Case, a seasoned collaborator known for her gale-force vocals with the New Pornographers, as well as her genre-melding solo work, leads the way on discursive story songs such as “Behind the Armory.”

All told, not quite the equal of any of the artists’ best work, but better than anyone would have a right to expect from a one-off collaboration.

—Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

Brandy Clark

Album: “Big Day in a Small Town”

Grade: B

“Big day in a small town” is the sort of concept that, in the hands of a country hack, would ooze with sentimentality and nostalgia. That’s not what you get with Brandy Clark. On her 2013 debut, “12 Stories,” she established herself as one of country’s brightest young writers and performers, and she builds on that reputation here.

Clark’s town is populated by flesh-and-blood characters like the former “Homecoming Queen,” whose humdrum life now lacks the magic and promise of youth, a single mother scraping by in “Three Kids No Husband,” and the defiant misfit of “Girl Next Door” (“If you want the girl next door, then go next door”). On “Since You’ve Gone to Heaven,” addressing her late father, the singer laments “the broken pieces of the Norman Rockwell dream.”

Which is not to say it’s all a downer. The music is bright and radio-friendly — this is about as well-crafted as mainstream country gets — and Clark has a knack for sending up small-town foibles with affectionate humor, as she does on “Soap Opera” and the title song. Even “Broke,” about hard times on the farm, treats a serious topic with a light, even subversive, touch: “The white left the picket, the fleas left the hound, yeah/ And even the crickets have moved into town/ Now we get our kicks off stuff we can grow ...” And Clark obviously gets hers from writing true-to-life stories.

—Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer