Pre-Owned Bombazine (CD 0093624539827) by Meryn Cadell

0093624539827. Pre-Owned: Good condition. CD. Bombazine's predecessor (Angel Food for Thought) was mostly a spoken word release with key bits set to music, and its successor (Six Blocks) was music through and through. This, then, would be the difficult "transitional" album. Most of the numbers on this album lean toward music with very literate lyrics: "Jonny and Betty" is a story of forbidden love, bashing, and a domestic facade; "Janet Clark" is a love letter from a bank clerk to the man that robbed her; "Steam Clean Express" asks the question "If you can never be too rich or too thin, when you eventually collapse on the street, is it expensive to keep the story out of the newspaper?" Special guests like the Rheostatics, Ben Mink (k.d.lang), Tyler Stewart (Barenaked Ladies), and Andy Stochansky (Ani DiFranco) keep what music there is up to tip-top quality. The best bit on the album, though, is the spoken-word "curb," about breaking up with someone in a car, only to get stuck in traffic as you try to screech away. And as transitional albums go, this one succeeds nicely, bringing Meryn Cadell smoothly away from performance art-oriented material into a song-based format that suits her far better. ~ Sean Carruthers, Rovi