Madeline Peyroux - Careless Love

[DudeAsInCool]

Billed as today's modern Billy Holiday...worth a listen.

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The Sound of the City

Early Bird

Thrush attempts again to show everything old is new again

September 28th, 2004 12:35 PM

Madeline Peyroux

Le Jazz au Bar

September 22

Dreamland, Madeline Peyroux's promising debut, came out in 1996. Yet despite its so-called vintage material—Billie Holiday meets honky-tonk blues with a dash of Edith Piaf heartbreak—Peyroux was ahead of her time. Taking advantage of the serendipitous atmosphere fostered by the Norah Jones Phenomenon, Rounder Records signed Peyroux and just released her follow-up,Careless Love. It's a spare, subdued, and more focused effort that finds Peyroux's voice more mature and less like a zeppelin hovering over jaunty, sassy arrangements.

Last Wednesday, Peyroux appeared under the crystal chandelier at Au Bar a half-hour late, timid, birdlike, and winged in a drapey shirt over swooshy pants. With very little stage banter and a fair amount of self-consciousness, Peyroux slung her battered Martin over her shoulder and pulled faithfully from the new album. After a heartrending "I'll Look Around," she remarked, "That's an old one, and so it stays with you for a while."

In an hour-and-15-minute set, her clear voice, graceful second-fiddle guitar strumming, and skillful trio hardly strayed from mid-tempo swing, shuffle, and ballads—save for their closer, a jazzy ode to New York, "Spreadin' Rhythm Around," in which Hammond B-3 whirled and pulsed. Maybe it was too early: With melancholic loneliness pervading every carefully considered cover (most hauntingly Elliott Smith's "Between the Bars"), Peyroux is made for wee small hours.

"It was a real treat being able to sing for you," she told us. "It's really asimple thing." But though it's one thing to busk on street corners for passersby for years, it's quite another to sing for paying midtown customers for six nights. And there's nothing simple about returning eight years later to a landscape awash in would-be Billie. So cover Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen again, write more songs with Jesse Harris (what ingenue songstress doesn't he know?), Ms. Peyroux. This is your Second Chance.

CARRIE HAVRANE - The Village Voice

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0439/sotc.php

[DudeAsInCool]

You can check out her site and sample some music at:

http://www.madeleinepeyroux.com/

Or listen to the first cut on KCRW's Morining Becomes Electric:

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