Cover Their Eyes

This album was a disappointment after reading the rave reviews in Hi-Fi+Listening to it I felt Krista Detor was just doing enough, no more, no less. I kept waiting, track after track, for a spark to ignite things. It never happened.

One of the finest singer-songwriter albums of 2007, "Cover Their Eyes" is an ironic smack at environmental devastation [it came out not long after the flooding of New Orleans]and American industrial decay mixed up with heartbreaking tales from the sad old hinterland of the heart. Krista Detor has an achingly nuanced voice that serves up clever, witty, surreal lyrics and ear-worm melodies on a beautifully produced album. She's one of those little known artists of top-drawer quality you'll want to feel superior telling everybody about. Get there first.

The review on this site of 'Mudshow', her previous album, really says it all. That was an excellent CD, and this is at least as good. It is extraordinary that an artist as original and talented as this is nowhere near as well-known as a host of less gifted but more extensively marketed alternatives, but it must surely be only a matter of time before justice prevails.'Americana' is an over-used term which may or not be strictly applicable here, but this is American music at its best; sophisticated without being slick and over-produced, and in touch with its roots without synthetic ethnicity.'Cover Their Eyes' really carries on where 'Mudshow' left off, which is not to say it's just more of the same. The arangements are more ambitious and complex and the material perhaps a little less spare, with Detor's glorious voice and piano given full rein, accompanied by faultless playing by a range of excellent instrumentalists. Lots of really beautiful material, outstanding among it being the wistful 'Dinner with Chantel', the catchily melodic 'Pretty Horses Run' and the beautiful and haunting 'Icarus'.