This article was originally published on beingtheremag.com, an independent music and film magazine that ran from 2004 to 2007. It is presented here as part of the Being There Magazine archive.
By Adam Anklewicz | Being There Magazine, April 2005
Back To Me shows Kathleen Edwards to be a great storyteller, musician and singer. Unfortunately the album is not as strong as I had hoped. The slow paced album is very mellow and dragged out. Edwards is a good songwriter but unfortunately the songs don’t tend to shift theme or style much.
Going from song to song, Back To Me has a solid feeling that carries through the entire album, but there isn’t much change from track to track. Thematically, the majority of the tracks are about the ending of a relationship. She sings very personally to her lover and gets revenge, clams dominance and shows her feelings of being trapped before finally leaving.
A personal theme to an album is very exciting and has led to some of the best albums, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks or David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name, but where they succeed is where Edwards fails unfortunately. That is, Edwards’ emotions. The album is produced to give a clean, solid sound. You can hear every instrument, and every string, but it seems as if they recorded each track so many times that the raw emotion in the songs are gone. The album comes across as being too dry.
Each track tends to blend into the next, and unfortunately none of the songs stand above the rest. Surrounding herself with some amazing musicians, including Benmont Tench from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Edwards is able to create some really good songs, whether or not it is mono-thematic.
The album art and photographs are absolutely gorgeous. They depict items listed off in the song “Pink Emerson Radio,” a song which describes personal artifacts and questions the importance of these material possessions. “Pink Emerson Radio” is one of the highlights of the album. As she lists what sounds like the contents of her house, including my favourite “record player made of tubes / playing Tommy by The Who,” her voice is eerie as her house burns down.
This is an album which I think will help a lot of people though a hard time in their life, most likely getting a lot of replay. With her strong voice and the haunting pedal steel one can get lost easily and entranced. This album will definitely find its market and it has found a deserved place on my CD shelf for the next time I’m down.