Knife in the Water,
Cut the Cord

Label: Aspyr
Year: 2003

(2 out of 5)

Austin-based Knife in the Water create songs about life on the edge. Or, at least that's what I think their songs are about. It's awfully tough to tell from the mostly-nonsensical lyrics; for example: Mother moth cocoon becomes a bloody mess / Lights between the trees drinking antifreeze. Jeff Tweedy may be able to pull off such gibberish, but he has the chops and the sound to back it up. Knife in the Water, alas, does not.

Aaron Blount and Laura Krause lead the band through a bewildering assortment of spacey tunes, a few of which actually manage to work. "Decoration Day Flood," for example, finds the duo seamlessly melding their vocals (for once) over a steadily building drum and guitar beat, appropriate for a song about a flood wiping a town away. "Golden Calf Highway" is another song that works, largely because Blount manages to craft halfway-intelligible lyrics and the band produces trippy, druggy sounds to match.

As a whole, however, the album is frustrating. Blount's vocal range is quite limited. Krause's voice has a quality that borders on the ethereal, but it isn't featured often enough. To these ears, the dozen songs tend to sound too much alike, and when several of them are a bloody mess, the whole effort is muddled at best.

Buy: Amazon

July 15, 2004