Cooking Vinyl
2006
Fireproof
About This Album
Dawn Landes' second album shows that while she's been characterized as a folk artist, it might be more appropriate to say she has her own quietly varied spin on a number of styles, using her talents as a studio engineer to create something that has a tense, moody feeling that wouldn't surprise listeners of performers ranging from Suzanne Vega to Alison Krauss (or, for that matter, producers like Jon Brion and T Bone Burnett). Backed by a variety of able performers, most notably Ray Rizzo on "drums, vocals, chaos," Landes plays everything from guitars to Optigans to bells as well as sings, but what's interesting is how relatively uncluttered Fireproof sounds -- there's always a sense of space that the music fills but doesn't dominate, matched by the gentle swath of echo she adds to her voice). Sometimes the production touches are absolutely perfect in their spot-on precision -- consider how the cymbal splashes and brisk guitar feed off each other on the reinterpretation of the standard "I Don't Need No Man," or how the combination of overdubbed backing vocals and thumb piano on "Private Little Hell" creates an atmosphere at once pretty and strangely queasy.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9 and 10)

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