A great set of pipes

Reviewed April 2007

From Tennessee by way of Hawaii, singer-songwriter Brandy Robinson's new CD shows an artist straddling folk and rock. She plays mostly acoustic music on her release, but with an alt rock edge to it.

It's her singing that anchors this CD – a nice combination of naturally attractive pipes and some solid technique make putting the spotlight on her singing a solid move. She's got a blues singer's ability to use her voice for both melody and rhythm; she doesn't scat, but she does bounce hard on the beat with her voice on some songs, and it's a pretty neat effect. There's some jazz in her singing, too, her ability to stretch the beat, to hold a note. And there's some real dexterity, an ability to jump all over the scale without ever once missing.

Her singing reminds more than a bit of Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell. Her songs aren't to that point of comparison yet, but they're solid enough to giver that voice of hers a nice workout.

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).