Reviews

Mama's Broke
Album: Reunion
Label: Free Dirt
Tracks: 12
Website: https://www.mamasbroke.ca

The third album by Nova Scotia duo Amy Lou Keeler (guitar, banjo, shruti box) and Lisa Maria (fiddle, mandolin) follows-up their 2022 Juno Awards nominated 'Narrow Line', keeping the mood and tone restrained and low key for gothic Americana nine songs and three instrumentals that blend together their Nova Scotian roots, Appalachian tradition and Eastern European influences.

Moody guitar work carries album opener 'Failing', which features double bassist Paul Kowert, underscoring the Gillian Welch comparisons that inform many of the tracks, but with the song belying its title and, while it may begin by remarking "I've seen plenty of sides of the road/With plenty of people I know" is seems to more about someone who's irrepressible when things go pear-shaped ("Reaching up ahead to find/A new life, one where you're always in love/Free and light/ God gives you more than enough/A new life and you're never alone/Or failing"). Until it's exposed to be about being caught in an abusive relationship where "it's without failing you'll put me down again".

Inspired by the workers who built the railways, economic inequalities and the struggle to rise above them inform the pulsing fingerpicked bluesy rhythm of 'Heaven' ("Walking down that old rail line/I was thinking on the wealth divide/And the old folks who worked all their lives/To dig this hole so deep and wide") expanding on the idea to talk about how "there'll be nothing left when it's all done/It's wicked means to lesser ends/And no one heeds the common man/When the water's salt and the land is dry…just chalk it up to struggle and strife", rejecting the platitude of rewards in the afterlife in the line "I don't wanna go to heaven/Just wanna get up off the ground".

Burbling banjo sets the path for 'Build It Up' which, given colour by sprightly fiddle, is about resilience and the uplift of music in the face of an oppressive society summed up in its refrain "If you don't build it up, somebody else will tear it down", underlining the point with reference to the loss of the natural environment to the highways of progress.

Banjo percolates and fiddle wails like a lost ghost on the spooked mountain folk sounding 'All Alone' with its forlorn lines "All your love forgotten/You break, but never bend/All alone/All your love forgotten" asking "What then are you for?".

Gender politics are the core of the standout, 'The Nameless' their voices backdropped by drone while Maria's banjo notes weave in and around as it speaks of women subjected to physical and emotional violence, reduced to society's narrow simplified roles and labels, here captured in four archetypes, the forsaken lover (£She met a sailor who left her by the sea/Doomed to wait forever"), the callous mother judged by her perceived failures and not her struggles ("She gave her babies to a stranger/To save them from the darkness that came to follow her"), the victim of domestic violence sidelined by sympathy for the perpetrator ("He lost his temper but he's such a nice guy"), and, the missing daughter abducted on the highway and never seen again ("He swore he never touched her, just offered her a ride") as they cry "how many till no more".

Kowert on double bass, ecology issues and humankind's neglect of nature are in the frame for the fingerpicked rewilding ballad lament 'Wildflowers', followed, Maria on guitar. by the second instrumental 'Dig Deep And Win Wiseley'. Opening with a droning note and again with Kowert's double, bass, the minimalist five-minute 'Bridges' weaves an impressionistic ambience around its tale of crushed spirit ("Wild girl, where are you now?/You who wore your anger like a crown… Now you've got a baby girl at home") and a toxic marriage ("The man you love has been out all night drinking/All over town, burning all the bridges down, you've been building/ And left you by the stranded side"), the track flowing into a string instrumental passage before it ebbs away, the pulsing fiddle shaped 'Fifolet Waltz' takes its title from the wisp-like light said to wander the Louisiana swamps, the music mirroring the atmospherics it creates.

Philippe Bronchtein on pedal steel and Bill Allison handling double bass duties. 'Old-Fashioned Love Song' is what it says on the tin, a mid-tempo backwoods country lope with self-reflexive lyrics on the nature of such songs ("I never tried to write a love song, till the love went wrong/It's always easier to say how I feel after it's gone/All the little disappointments, and the cursing of their names/If it's pleasure or pain, the words still come out the same") and the singer's commitment phobia ("When you step a little closer, I back away …too proud to sing along to an old-fashioned love song").

Opening with lonesome, melancholic fiddle, it ends with title track as such, ' No Great Reunion', a droned and sparsely sung old school spiritual-like number that speaks of isolationist mentality ("Are you an island, or a dwelling/Some lonesome tower that breaks the sky/You keep your house and I'll keep mine") and draws on religious imagery to condemn those who seek to wield "dominion over creation" because "no earthly power can rule the common/No officer, soldier or king…For that will sure destruction bring" as, calling on a coming together, it pronounces "have no forgiveness for our rulers/Those profiteers who bleed the poor/For they will know their ruination/Is our Reunion at their door".

If the album has a central message it's summed up in the song's final lines "No Truth or Beauty without compassion/Love now, lest we lose our way/You'll never know till it fades away". Go for Broke.

Mike Davies

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