Metalheads Respond to Pistol Annies

Polk Salad Annie

oh horshoe i dont know anything abt the intended personae i am just talking abt the "flatness" of the vocal performances.

also shit like this "Per Lambert, whether or not the Annies would release an album will "be up to the fans." drives me crazy because its such blatant pr bullshit

i don't know that i identify with most artists i listen to tbh. it's not really something i expect to happen. i feel like the album explores some narratives about femininity and sometimes defiantly picks up and champions pieces of them ("hell on heels") and sometimes renders the incredibly sadness of falling short ("beige") and is sometimes defiant about being regarded as a failure as a "lady" ("bad example.") the experiences rendered on the album are pretty far from my own (though i agree with lex that it's zeitgeisty about the recession. i think that's why "housewife's prayer" means the most to me) but they are interesting/moving. to me.

a lot of the pr surrounding the album is hard to take, yes.

i am kind of a miranda lambert stan, i guess.

http://media.ideaanddesignworks.com/idw/covers/little_orphan_annie/LOA1cvr400.jpg

about femininity and class, i should say

hs - I don't usually identify at all, but I am not usually courted this actively either, ie the various "Annies"

also: as I said, Pistol Annies were p much shut out from the country radio station that I was exposed to--I learned about it from ILM--so I was blissfully ignorant of most of the PR bullshit

yeah i mean the patter about the kinds of annies they are didn't really influence my reception of the album. when i talk about the personae i mean as i understand them from the lyrics, essentially.

i wish we got ANY PR about the album in the UK

stuff they've said about it feeds into something i've long kinda thought about how in girl groups, women feel able to express various sentiments that they don't necessarily feel able to express in their solo careers: sentiments that can be quite hardline or unsympathetic or raw or exclusionary of men. destiny's child vs beyoncé. electrik red.

Sad but not surprised at people taking swipes at whole genres (e.g "gloopy" country music, whatever that means).

like i said i think that miranda lambert song is pretty good, im just trying to sort out what they (whthr thats her or the band or the producer or whatever) decided to do to her vocal and why. i am not nearly as crazy abt the songs/songwriting either but that can be hard on first/second listen or whatever, but i think whoever was talking abt production upthread was dead on, theres something terribly processed and empty sounding going on with the vocal tracks here.

my comment abt the pr thing has nothing to do with what i think of the album btw, that line just was obnoxious enough i had to react

i do understand why you find it offputting, Amanda. some of the narratives of femininity they pick at magpie-like are offputting (mostly in "hell on heels," i think) but i think that's kind of what the album is about, dramatizing the limiting nature of those narratives and the attempt to willfully wrest something from them.

people been doing it to country and metal for years.
on ILM its indie it happens to

xps

Alfred - nobody said "gloopy" in this thread before you did.

george started this thread lets see what non metal fans say about metal

Poptimists get into ...METAL?!

that's a good point about girl groups, lex. maybe the performance of femininity is automatically more foregrounded with them?

This was my #1 record of the year. I won't go into another spirited defense of the thing, as I've done it in several other forums and newspapers; but what grabbed me was how each woman carves a space for herself in the songs, but is generous enough to ask for sisterly support from the other two, which is an apt extra-diagetic metaphor of what happens in the songs themselves: women in mid-sized towns married to men who see them as accessories, women who are accustomed to seeing themselves as accessories, finding succor in booze, pills, and dreaming.

It's a minor record (a bit like Wilburys meets Trio) but no record last year thrilled me so much.

I will grant that this sounds better than the rest of the glop that passes for country music (if those awful spotify ads are to be believed?!)
I will also grant that this probably resonates pretty well. The lyrics are real, and surprisingly frank. That's good.

― La Lechera, Thursday, February 2, 2012 11:18 AM

La Lechera, the reason you don't identify with any of the Annies is that they need you to join their band. You are the Missing Annie. You're from Chicago right, could you be Prairie Fire Annie or something?

pretty sure thats not an indictment of country per se alfred

haha i don't read the personae as stepford wives!

Quite the opposite – they don't want to BECOME stepford wives.

sorry alfred .Searched for gloop not glop.

"glop" != "gloop", fyi

pretty sure thats not an indictment of country per se alfred

yeah yeah I know – somewhere in the empyrean there's this gorgeous thing called COUNTRY that was once awesome but nowadays there ain't no more Willies and Hags. I get it.

ha I've grown to hate lots and lots of country music in the last year btw. I tend to agree with LL more than disagree

Alfred please pop over to george's thread and let us know what you think of the songs there

I made a typo.

You're really reducing what I meant, but whatever.

is the new miranda lambert good? i love "mama's broken heart," but haven't listened to the rest yet.

I have a friend who really loves stuff like this, and she thinks I am a heartless robot.

Maybe that's the missing Annie. Short Haired Robotic Annie.

Alfred might not know that I am George, Kerr

anyways yeah anybody who wants to listen to Uncle acid and Windhand can be directed to the Poptimist listens to Metal thread

La Lechera, I don't want to single you out because you liked the record; I had a problem with some of the assumptions made about country. I'll be the first to admit that I really didn't start listening to modern country until eight or nine years ago, and I had to train myself to accept genre conventions.

you are def not a heartless robot, Amanda. also, i often feel like a robot these days and i love this album, so.

the new Lambert isn't that good, alas (xhuxk will disagree). Four or five good songs though.

well i cant speak for LL but my read on it is that theres something to be said about the invasion of overglossed pop production into the country market but thats a whole other topic kinda - ie my feelings that miranda (again judging from a few songs on both sides) seems to have been heavily sanitized as a singer on the pistol annies production end, and thats a shame

many xposts to alfred

or maybe not!

I'll be the first to admit that I really didn't start listening to modern country until eight or nine years ago, and I had to train myself to accept genre conventions.

my life is far too short and precious to waste any of it training myself to like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift

however it is not too short and precious to spend time on this thread, apparently

george i just want to see if Alfred or others dismiss metal in the same way he dislikes it happening to country. (though everyone might dismiss it completely by not reading or posting )

your guys' take on this record is like the exact opposite of mine: "Baggage Claim" seems way more like sanitized fanservice than anything off of Hell on Heels

I don't! Metal is The Great Undiscovered Country.

xpost

maybe Kellie Pickler should cut a metal record

(the new Kellie Pickler btw is pretty good).

that's a good point about girl groups, lex. maybe the performance of femininity is automatically more foregrounded with them?

yeah - i think there's something inherently theatrical rather than personal about the format, so it's both easy to "play around with" archetypes without becoming/being seen as that archetype yourself - particularly if those archetypes are dislikeable or transgressive. people are much more accepting of the idea that women can inhabit characters and roles in girl groups, i guess.

to return to a point someone made earlier: the title track wouldn't work if it was revved up like Gretchen Wilson. I like its ominous midtempo swag, as if the women wanted the Hell on Heels archetype to sink in with listeners before deconstructing it on other songs.

i like the title track as cartoonisly sociopathic overture before the rest of the album looks at how they got there (or how they got to fantasizing about being there)

yeah that seems otm to me, both dlh and Alfred

it is a creepy ass song for sure

listening to the rest of the album really does throw the title track into a different light - it almost feels like the album's conclusion, like the album's a story being told in flashback

infinite annies