The lighter songs are the ones where she only gets depressed sometimes is a nice, self-deprecating line from Rebecca Pronsky.
She's joking, of course. As a marketing strategy it would give entirely the wrong impression because although there's a certain wariness, and indeed weariness, in Pronsky's lyrics, she presented a great variety of musical moods to the denizens of Jordanhill, who packed into a room where Pronsky previously played to an audience she could have counted on her fingers.
Word about the singer-songwriter who has traded in her Brooklyn cowgirl country style for a more all-encompassing Americana approach had clearly got out, and she repaid the promoter's faith with a couple of absorbing sets that were enjoyable not just for the musical partnership between Pronsky and her husband, guitarist Rich Bennett, but for her ditzy humour and entertaining between-song chat.
Bennett's superb electric guitar work has to take a lot of the credit for the duo's ability to switch between folky-pop songs with a cutting lyrical edge through vintage Brill Building-esque songcraft and echo-haunted rockabilly into the sort of rawkin' out that fills stadia, let alone lounge bars, on The Garden from Pronsky's latest album, Only Daughter.
It's Pronsky's writing that invites such scope, though, and she creates strong images with words she wraps in direct, easily digested melodies and sings with both warmth and steely conviction. Big City Lights had the audience turning into a choir but for an example of Pronsky's class as a writer it would have been hard to beat Fragile World, with a languid, loosely Latin-American vibe that could have been tailor-made for a Stan Getz tenor solo.
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