(Sub Pop/Stomp)

Papa was a dynamite salesman

Sera Cahoone is an attractive proposition on paper – an ex-drummer who used to play with Band Of Horses turning her attention to wistful folk singer-songwriterdom. Add in the fact that she’s the daughter of a Rocky Mountains dynamite salesman (seriously, only a Wichita lineman would be more apt), and that she cut her teeth bashing the skins for a group of bluesmen at the tender age of 12, and the prospect of Only As The Day Is Long would have any Scout Niblett fan salivating. The only problem is, though, that Cahoone’s music is the antithesis of avant-garde – there’s no one-woman-behind-the-drums-screaming-about-death schtick here. Instead, we have wistful country-and-westernified folk that, while lovely, is eminently forgettable. It’s something like Cat Power putting out faithful covers of Patsy Cline, or a female version of Bill Callahan’s latest album, but with less interesting lyrics and simpler production. Of course, Cahoone is talented – Sub Pop album contracts aren’t easy to come by, as any Seattle indie musician will tell you – but her talents have been employed to make the kind of music that will, no doubt, grace one of the more maudlin scenes in the next series of Grey’s Anatomy.

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CHAD PARKHILL

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