Search - Laura Cantrell :: Not the Tremblin Kind

The Nun's Priest's Tale

Laurence Upton | 12/08/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This album sings itself from the heart of an intersate highway truck stop. Everything about this album (music, lyrics, voice, complexity, thinness) reminds me of a breakfast counter off the highway in Maryland where a chance encounter brought into conversation me, two women, a man with a big rig and a waitress with an unforgiving apron. Three hours and too much coffee later, we had all told our stories--none of them brilliant, none of them hopeless, all of them understandable, all of them human. Then we all went our separate ways, looking for whatever holy, blissful martyr our roads would let us meet. I'd recommend Laura Canterll precisely because she isn't flashy, pushy or phoney. She's just singing the country music I grew up listening to."

No-frills Americana

Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 01/07/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Although Laura Cantrell comes from Nashville, she is as far removed musically from rhinestone cowboys and saccharin strings as she is geographically, based as she is in Brooklyn NY. This is no-frills Americana country music, following in the wake of the Byrds and Emmylou, and is a gem of a record.

Laura modestly includes only four of her own songs on the album, though two of them are the highlights of the album for me, Churches Off The Interstate and Queen Of The Coast (no. 42 in the John Peel 2000 Festive 50), the latter said to be about Bonnie Owens, the yodelling country star who married Merle Haggard and took to the sidelines as his career took off. This album is about the songs, and many were discovered by Laura through her WMFU show Radio Thrift Shop, which she has broadcast from Jersey City NJ since 1993, and from friends and neighbours who are performers. The record has provided a platform for relatively unknown singers and writers, much as Emmylou Harris records have.

Not The Tremblin' Kind was written by George Usher, who had been in the Ministers Of Sound and in an earlier Minneapolis band called Beat Rodeo in the mid-eighties. Another member of Beat Rodeo was Dan Prater, who wrote Do You Ever Think Of Me, and was to play on Laura's next album. Joe Flood, who wrote Pile Of Woe, was in Mumbo Gumbo, while Two Seconds was a cover of Michigan band the Volebeats, and written by their singer Bob McCreedy. Laura's version made no. 27 in the Festive 50 in 2000. The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter comes from a well-regarded album by Amy Allison, daughter of Mose Allison, and Somewhere, Some Night is the work of Carl Montgomery, brother of Melba and Earl "Peanut" Montgomery, and co-writer of Six Days On The Road - a song I'd like to hear Laura Cantrell tackle. The other two songs were written by producer Jay Sherman-Godfrey (from World Famous Blue Jays), one in conjunction with Laura's husband, Jeremy Tepper, who runs Diesel Only Records.

The lack of pretension of Not The Tremblin' Kind lays it open to critical scrutiny as it doesn't hide behind over-glossy production and obfuscating arrangements, but it passes with flying colours thanks to solid performances, top class songs and a sympathetic producer

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