Alana Davis - Surrender Dorothy
By: Mark Runyon | Category: Album Archive | 04/28/05 | 11:54 PM
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Grade: C- |
Genre: Pop
Summary: This is a very disappointing disk. It's not that it's bad, it's just not very good. It doesn't live up to the standard that Alana has set for herself in her previous albums.
I often wonder about artists that stick critic signal flares in the title to their albums. Like Alana here. All I can think of when I read that title is, "I surrender, I surrender. Please don't make me listen to anymore of this." Yeah it's a tad bit mellow dramatic and taken to the extreme with concerns to the album in question, but why would you set yourself up for that inevitable punishment? This release is a sticky one. If you stumbled upon it, never having heard Alana before, you may fall in love with her voice, her unique rhythms and her undeniable charm, but don't give away your heart that easily. That yellow brick road is tarnished with disappointment. |
For the record, Blame It On Me and Fortune Cookies were both fabulous works. I've been steadily tracking her progress since Fortune Cookies, patiently awaiting this new work. It seems she has bid sionora to the major label rat race and decided to start her own label, Tigress Records, affording her complete creative control. It's so nice seeing an artist taking command of their own musical destiny instead of waiting around hoping that someone will pick them up and screw up their vision (ahem!). So the question arises, with everything lined up to go so right, what went so very wrong with Surrender Dorothy? She looks like Alana, she sounds like Alana, she even feels like Alana yet no Alana. She brings to the table that same R&B punctured rock, vocals loaded with attitude, but the songs whither on the vine. They tend to wallow in their own mediocrity, forming the equivalent of a b-side compilation passed off as a regular release.
It doesn't seem to have those great songs that dance around in your head for weeks on end like "32 Flavors", "I Want You", "Crazy" and "A Chance With You". These really lifted and solidified past efforts. The songs that are noteworthy on Dorothy never really venture past the realm of good. Those numbers are fairly limited to the first three tracks and number six. As a set, they seem rather uninspired, not following through and seemingly content not to disturb things too much.
The opening track, "Letter", has a soft, restrained vibe of a devouring relationship that won't release her. The chorus raises the tempo and slides us quickly ahead. "The Benefit" is more of the saucy Alana Davis that we remember. She really bites into this one and gives us that nice guitar driven rhythm that has the punch of her contemporary soul sister, Joss Stone. The quiet "Right There" is a love song like a warm wool coat. It is very unassuming and ethereal in its approach.
After these, she doesn't offer us much reason to continue hanging around this party. As par for the course, she throws a cover on here, "the Reaper", which is very strange selection. When you look at her previous covers, she really had another life to give to Difranco's "32 Flavors" seeing as the original is more stripped down and has a bare bones feel to it. "The Reaper"? The classic rock staple? Why would this R&B/pop diva be taking on this track? It doesn't make any sense. I can understand wanting to offer up something new to try to reshape it as her own, but in everyone's mind eye this belongs firmly between Led Zeppelin and Rush. You can't really do much with it if you are Alana. She should have left it to the stoners.
Basically this amounts to a CD5. She could have sliced this down to around 4 or 5 tracks and released a mini-album to hold us over until her next full effort. This doesn't have the soul embodied within her full efforts. She seems to be just sloughing one off, not putting forth that unbridled intensity that has been her signature up until now. The only person I would recommend this to would be the die-hard Alana fan that has missed her terribly in the past several years and wants to find out where in Oz she had wandered to. Even they will be forced to sift through this to pick out the bright spots. For everyone else, pass on this album and check out Fortune Cookies or Blame It On Me. These are two stellar albums definitely worthy your music dollar. Let's look past this junior slump (what do you call it when the third album flops?) and hope that Alana has gotten this funk out of her system, allowing the true funk to return.
Check out "The Benefit" as one of next week's featured selections on Live365's Innovative Radio. The best music on Internet radio.
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