REVIEW: Mya Byrne -- Rhinestone Tomboy
It’s been a little while coming, but from the get-go Rhinestone Tomboy strides in confident and complete, a solid second album from Americana trailblazer, Mya Byrne, that was surely worth the wait. My first listen was on a long, cross-country train journey, and this record passes the Americana litmus of music to move to with flying colours.
Rolling from the quintessential country-rock of the opening track, through the late ’60s studio experiments of single “Autumn Sun,” with nods to the emerging grunge sound of the ’90s in “Come On” and “Devil in My Ear,” Byrne stretches generous arms around myriad genres. You can hear exactly why label Kill Rock Stars (who put out an early Nirvana demo on their first compilation, blew up Elliot Smith, and discovered Bikini Kill, amongst many other marvels) are putting Byrne out ahead for their new Nashville imprint.
You can also hear the child sitting on the floor surrounded by 45s – these songs are undoubtedly the work of a musician who loves music. Each song on its own would make perfect sense at midnight round a fire on an acoustic guitar, a testament to Byrne’s aptitude with songwriting as a craft. But the album actually gives us this borderless, free-roaming mashup of sounds and textures, all from a fairly minimal palette.
Bringing together an all-star lineup of Nashville’s bright young things, the electric guitars of Ellen Angelico and producer Aaron Lee Tasjan give the album so much colour and shape, while Tommy Scifres’ bass and Megan Coleman’s drums keep the thing chugging along with an understated, precise and compelling groove. It’s also great to hear Byrne’s acoustic picking on “Smoke and Bones” and “Lend You a Hand,” like a peek between the boards at the foundations, and of course Mya’s voice holds the whole show together, self-assured, delivering every lyric with both passion and ease.
This record sits so comfortably amongst the branches of the rock’n’roll family tree, its innovation is kind of hard to spot. But there’s something in the breaking down of divisions between ‘styes’ or ‘genres’ or whatever you want to call them, that speaks to who Byrne is and what she’s up to as an artist. On a tune like “Please Call Me Darlin,” the chords, the structure, the tone are all familiar, but a classic country tune in which the orator is championing compassionate, emotionally literate communication – now that’s hard to find in the Hall of Fame. As Tasjan says, “If our goal as a society is to become softer, more loving and more accepting of each other, we need artists like Mya Byrne, who possesses these qualities, to help lead us on our mission.”
And if that’s the mission that Mya Byrne is on, then this album is a bold and hopeful proof that she is more than fit for the task.
