Shonna Tucker & Eye Candy
Album: A Tell All
Label: Sweet Nectar
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.shonnatucker.net

Shonna's best known of course as bassist and singer with Drive By Truckers, and she's now the fourth member of that outfit to release a solo album, albeit after leaving the band! But although she'd already been performing just a few her own songs within the band context for around five years, the quality of those tracks varied quite a bit. So it's a pleasure to report that A Tell All is a uniformly strong record, with decent hooks aplenty amongst the attractively moulded melodies and distinctively twangy backings configured by Shonna's ironically-named Eye Candy band, which comprises four of the most prolific musos on the Athens (GA) music scene (John Neff on guitar and pedal steel, Bo Bedingfield on guitar, Neil Golden on keyboards and Clay Leverett on drums) who display a superb dynamic and chemistry.

It's a mighty sound alright, with Shonna's bass working so well in consort with both the rhythm and melody elements in the texture. The crew also provides a brilliant foil for Shonna's haunting Alabama-drawl vocals and her honest telltale lyrics about "love, jealousy, nights spent on the road and nights spent in the kitchen", which mark her advancement as a songwriter onto another plane from her work with the DBT band. A Tell All really does allow her the chance to stretch out beyond the anthemic catchy chorus singalong of its opening number Since Jimmy Came into new territory and a more varied climate of emotional expression: from the aching yearning of the steel-soaked Arielle, the mournful honky-tonk slowie Your Jealousy, the skittering, classic cowboy-angst of Linda Please and the limpid acoustic-driven beauty of Lonely People, through to the organ-tread psych of Austin Side, the Zepp-heavy monster tread of I Bought A Pie, and the bouncier funk of A Family Dinner (and yeah, that's where the album gets its name).

Fittingly too, and perhaps against perceived odds, the whole album's cheeky preoccupation with culinary matters actually works in its favour, and the musical settings prove equally tasty (ok, that's an inevitable analogy I guess) but with a splash of Muscle Shoals soul alongside the swamp-pop-country vibe of the instrumentation. This here candy's not just for the eyes!

David Kidman