Pop CD of the Week - Hello Love Mark Edwards - Timesonline.co.uk If you knew that a band had used a patchwork quilt for the cover of their new album, you might expect the result to be a mass of wildly different colours. Not The Be Good Tanyas, though. On the front of Hello Love is a collection of blues, with the merest hint of variation visible at the edges - details I wouldn't bother you with if the colour scheme didn't provide a workable metaphor for the album itself. more |
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Hello Love (4 stars) Pete Paphides - Timesonline.co.uk They're usually found in the folk section but the genre doesn't do justice to this Vancouver female trio's reconfiguration of their influences. Hello Love yields covers from Prince's When Doves Cry to Neil Young's For the Turnstiles and a cracking version of Sean Hayes's A Thousand Tiny Pieces. more |
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Hello Love (3 1/2 stars) Chris Sahl - Prefixmag.com The Be Good Tanyas' original compositions, which make up more than half of Hello Love, hold their own seamlessly among the rearranged traditional and cover songs, but it's perhaps the album's final (hidden) track that best shows the scope of the players' talent. How a cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry" played and sung by three women on upright bass, acoustic guitar and banjo can prove not only the furthest thing from novelty -- more like one of the most accomplished, elegant and imaginative covers of the year -- is as much a marvel as the album itself. more |
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Hello Love by The Be Good Tanyas Nuria Stylianou - MarieClaire.co.uk The Canadian trio grace us with their third album of atmospheric acoustic tunes. They're a mix of old-style country, folk and blues - a delightful blend which helps inject a unique twist into both their cover songs and original work. more |
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Pop CD of the Week - Hello Love Helen Brown - Telegraph.co.uk Trish Klein, Sam Parton and Frazey Ford have cooked up a slow-bubbling, soulful stew of new and familiar songs that will nourish fans of intelligent, rootsy music. more |
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Hello Love (7 out of 10) Mark Phillips - Americana-uk.com "Hello Love" is perhaps best viewed as the album The Be Good Tanyas just made because they could- it feels like a rediscovery of their love for what they do, and a melding of their shiny pop instincts with their dark heart. more |
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Singer-guitarist Frazey Ford talks about her start in trip-hop, her cameo in The L-Word, and the trio's new album, Hello Love Caralyn Green - Venuszine.com The tea-sipping, back porch-rocking, sepia-toned aura that swirls around each of the Be Good Tanyas' tenderly crafted albums, it turns out, is more of a way of life than just a way of making music. Although, for Tanyas singer-guitarist Frazey Ford, life and music seem to be one in the same, interwoven, incomplete without the other. more |
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The Be Good Tanyas - "When Doves Cry" 3 stars Stephen M. Deusner - Pitchforkmedia.com Like so many of his songs, "When Doves Cry" seems so inseparable from Prince's performance-- the rhythms and melodies fitted to his delivery, the lyrics specific to the autobiographical fiction of Purple Rain-- that anyone covering it is going to sound a bit awkward. Now the British Columbia-based Be Good Tanyas put their spin on it, translating Prince's psychosexual self-reckoning to an alt-honkytonk setting. Played as an acoustic skiffle on guitar and drums, the main rhythm has lost its sleazy crawl. more |
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The Be Good Tanyas Chinatown Robin Aigner - RollingStone.com, March 10, 2003 Those thirsty for real backwoods hooch to chase the mass-market Zima of recent "roots-influenced" chart toppers should take a swig of The Be Good Tanyas. On their second release, Chinatown, the British Columbia trio offer up invigorating versions of traditional tunes, like "Reuben", as well as sweet-and-dirty originals such as the lush "Ship Out on the Sea." TBGT are strongest on the darker songs, like Townes Van Zandt's haunting "Waiting Around to Die" ("Well one time friends I had a ma/I even had a pa/He beat her with a belt once cause she cried"). These knotty-pine girls sound like no one else -- and no one else would sing two songs about a dead dog. |
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Tanyas Take Off Sarah Liss - NowToronto.com The group's new Chinatown disc charms with its lack of pretension. Remarkably, it's even more laid-back than Blue Horse, heavy on ballads that amble along at a leisurely pace. The original tunes are breathtaking (Frazey Ford delivers a powerful double whammy with Junkie Song and In Spite Of All The Damage, both striking expressions of longing and regret), but it's the trio's ability to completely inhabit other people's material that amazes. more |
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Chinatown - (4 stars)
Robert L. Doerschuk - AllMusic.com The homespun, slightly quirky approach that guided The Be Good Tanyas on Blue Horse permeates their enigmatically titled sophomore release too. If anything, these performances beckon the listener even more into the material, as a fiery hearth might draw strangers together on a cold night. The singing is raggedy and breathy, the instruments gently strummed or stroked; like whispered intimacies, these elements cast a conversational spell. more |
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China Girls Mike Doherty - Eye.net TBGTs express emotion without wallowing in it; even though Chinatown is full of sad songs about being lonesome, they're conveyed with intricate, delicate arrangements (courtesy of Ford, Parton and multi-instrumentalist Trish Klein) that have an earthy tinge but still seem to appear out of, and vanish into, the ether. A couple of songs feature the stately, melancholic cornet of Olu Dara, whose work straddles the avant-jazz and folk traditions. Dara overdubbed his solos in New York while TBGTs were in Vancouver; nonetheless, he exhibits an empathetic connection to their music. more |
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Bottom Line - New York, 12 March 2003 Scott Waldman - PopMatters.com The Be Good Tanyas have an uncanny knack for digging the soul out of every song they play. Whether it's Townes Van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die" or the old traditional "Oh Susanna" or one of their own magnificent compositions such as "Lakes of Pontchartrain", The Be Good Tanyas possess entirely any song they sing. They do this in the simplest way and with such ease that it hardly looks like they have to try at what they do. more |
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Radio Ping Pong Charlie Gillet - BBC There was neat timing in this visit by The Be Good Tanyas, at the end of a week in which Mariza had sold out two nights at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, while the Brits TV show on Thursday had revealed what a sorry state conventional pop music is in. Between them, Mariza and The Be Good Tanyas have manifested everything my programme on BBC London has hoped to showcase, proving what can be achieved by single-minded young women with a sense of purpose and not the slightest intention of following any of the rules laid down by the music industry in its current form. |
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Whistlin' Dixie Robin Aigner, RollingStone.com You're whistling "Dixie" as you push your wheelbarrow down a rutted country lane: Suddenly a steamy summer downpour drenches you to the bone and makes you run for shelter --where the sound of The Be Good Tanyas would make for an ideal welcome. |
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The Be Good Tanyas - Blue Horse David Pilot, RockZilla.net Those among us who crave "traditional" music in all its raw variations and stripped down beauty either already know about The Be Good Tanyas or will forthwith. Those who have a particular sound scheme for "traditional" looping in their subcranial jukeboxes beware. The Tanyas are all over the sonic map like Piet Mondrian with a canvas and some crack. more |
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The Be Good Tanyas - Blue Horse Paul Donnelly, BIRDpages It's a miserable rain soaked afternoon on Merseyside but for about 54 minutes I've been idling down dusty trails, rocking in a wicker chair on a back porch and basking in stories told by three ageless raconteurs from a time both eternally past and present. |
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Quotes... "Every so often you come across a sound that stops you in its tracks and simply makes you listen. Hypnotic. Simple, in the very best sense. Direct." "I get to use the word 'beguiling' in a quote! That's what these three women are. The Be Good Tanyas, and in particular the tune 'Littlest Birds' totally insinuated themselves into the World Cafe listeners' minds. If there is room for something truly beautiful on your playlist - play this." "The Be Good Tanyas have been a breath of fresh air on KGSR. Poppy but rugged, with beautiful harmonies offset by a down home rootsieness. Love 'em!" "The Be Good Tanyas was perhaps the most interesting debut of last year! Don't try to peg 'em....they'll change your mind on each track" "TBGT - we love 'em! We've been playing 'Littlest Birds' for 8 weeks now and it sounds great on the air--hooky, quirky and cool. This is roots music with an edge" "TBGT are much more than a typical vocal, rootsy trio - their songs are extremely well crafted and have a real edge to them, kinda like the BEST roots songs do" "...the deep high lonesome singers we've only heard about before... the voices of angels, grounded in the tradition of the common man - unique and joyously poignant." |
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