The Wrights: Red and Yellow, Blue and Green

[John (Biscuits and Gravy) Davy]

http://www.thewrightsmusic.com/

The Wrights are husband and wife duo, Adam and Shannon who have been making music together for nearly a decade but this is their first album of original material after a bad experience of life on a major label rather pulled the rug from under their career. Undeniably RYBG is astonishingly close in sound to Raising Sand, especially in the treatment of the vocals and the guitar parts, but T-Bone Burnett was nowhere near this particular production. In fact they produced this album themselves apart from a couple of tracks produced by their collaborator Paul Kennerley.

After you get over the way the opening couple of songs in particular sound like Raising Sand Part 2, a couple of other threads become apparent; the first is just how much of The Everly Brothers comes through in this modern version of acoustic guitars and perfect harmonies, and the second is how there's more than a little blues hovering in the background here. It's especially apparent on a song called 'I Cry' where Adam's sharply aggressive electric guitar lines, the sparse thump of the bass and Shannon's howl all add up to something very swamp-blues in flavour.

There are some near perfect country pop songs here - and I mean pop in the best possible sense: songs that are perfectly accessible and radio friendly but express honest truths for all that. 'Since You Left Me', 'We Were Made To Love' and 'Flying Home' could all, conceivably, have been sung by The Everlys in their pomp, whilst the more upbeat, rockabilly-ish songs 'The Way That I'm Living' and 'We'll All Drink Money' bring a welcome fillip to a collection that's predominantly in a blue mood. There's a lot of great beauty in these nine songs though I've found that my attention tends to drift before I get to the end as if I feel the lack of one big tune or a cutting loose, a letting down of the hair to really catch my imagination. But as Adam says on their website, this album represents but a step on the road as they recover the thread of what they want to achieve, musically, and there'll be a lot more from these guys yet.
John Davy