Hat Check Girl
Album: Road To Red Point
Label: Waterbug
Tracks: 10
Website: http://hatcheckgirl.net

Hat Check Girl is the name given to the collaboration between established songwriters Annie Gallup and Peter Gallway which started out three years ago with the tentative but promising Tenderness album and has since borne increasingly satisfying fruit with last year's Six Bucks Shy and now with album number three, definitely the finest thus far. Road To Red Point is a compelling collection, with a unique, potent yet fragile ambience that's almost surreal despite the concentration of the lyrics on universal worldly themes such as memory, hope and survival.

All but one of the ten songs are new originals co-penned by the two writers: the exception being a hypnotically lingering, fresh take on Up In The County (from Peter's 1994 album Small Good Thing). The songs took their initial inspiration from a collection of depression-era photographs that Annie and Peter had seen at the Santa Barbara Museum Of Art, specifically one by Hansel Mieth, Boys On The Road, which, together with a haunting photograph by Julie Cleveland, epitomised the shifting quality of the landscape of a remote stretch of the Oregon coast where the songs themselves subsequently came to be written.

The musical backdrop, here conjured by an assortment of acoustic, electric and resonator guitars, dobros, banjo and occasional keyboard and accordion, is for the most part extremely sparse but so very atmospheric, enabling us to focus closely on the pindrop poetry of the lyrics and the hushed intensity of the vocal delivery. Even the harder electric textures of cuts like Just Think Back and the title song can't upstage the telling impact of those literate sketches. Annie and Peter share out the vocal lead more or less equally, but always entirely appropriately for the context and viewpoint of the song, joining together in creative and/or physical harmony exactly when required.

From the eerily windswept antiquarian-back-porch feel of The Other Road and the intimate, intelligently interweaving duet reminiscences of Remember and Far Distant Shore, the charming reflection of Cape Rouge and the telling narrative of Scarlett, right through to the spooky semi-spoken chronicle of Texas Burning, the power of this disc never lets up, and once caught in its spell you won't want to interrupt its carefully coordinated natural flow.

David Kidman