Purely Sara Petite

Reviewed July 2006

Give it a chance, though, and you run serious risk of getting hooked.

On her new CD, Petite displays a confident delivery and down-to-earth charm that, coupled to 11 nicely crafted tunes, create as original a brand of country folk rock as San Diego County has heard since Eve Selis first arrived on the scene.

The arrangements incorporate banjo and fiddle as well as guitar – and on some cuts, the result is deep country ("Coming Home," "Tiger Mountain"). But elsewhere, she drifts more into a rock format. And "Ruby" is folk.

And yet, despite this stylistic range, "Tiger Mountain" is a cohesive album – due to the fact that every song is clearly, purely Sara Petite.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).