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After cutting two albums withthe Black Keys\'Dan Auerbach, singer, songwriter, and guitarist Jessica Lea Mayfield decided to go it alone for Make My Head Sing..., her ATO debut. While her previous offerings have been somewhat confessional singer/songwriter affairs that juxtaposed rootsy Americana and indie pop, this date moves in almost an entirely different direction. Co-produced with her husband, bassistJesse Newport, the pair played everything except drums -- not that there\'s much else. The record\'s first sound is a response-drenched, enormously distorted electric guitar, playing at a plodding pace. It\'s a shock if you\'ve heard either of her previous records. Her world-weary alto -- trained while singing in her family\'s bluegrass band -- drifts through many of these riff-laden tunes with an ethereality and confessional playfulness that contrasts sharply with music informed by everyone fromNirvanaand earlyFoo \"I Wanna Love You,\" \"Unknown Big Secret,\" \"Anything You Want\"), and even the latter-dayCure(\"Do I Have the Time\"). Despite the in-your-face attack in some of these cuts, the gorgeous melodies wind their way through the bombast. Elsewhere, \"Standing in the Sun\" would have been right at home onTell Me-- albeit with another arrangement. \"No Fun\" has a minimal, repetitive verse-and-chorus structure, a three-note bassline, and a snare that frame the vocal and vamp, until a careening guitar solo rips the middle wide open yet keeps the melody intact. Closer \"Seein* Starz\" is a sad love song with a pronounced pop hook accentuating the melancholy. The gentleness in her vocal floats atop the reverbed six-string riff and shimmering melody, creating a layered frame for her heartworn lyric. Make My Head Sing... is confident. One small complaint is that the rockers are so saturated in \'90s inspirational sources that those sounds can sometimes overshadow the subtler lyrical aspects in Mayfield\'s clever songwriting and singing (though her voice is at the front of every track here). It\'s not a perfect record, but noteworthy for its musical risk-taking and assertive attitude.
Teenage singer/songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield is the protégée ofDan Auerbachofthe Black Keys, who engineered and produced this, her debut full-length, in addition to playing \"guitar, organ, piano, drums and other instruments.\" From the sound of the tracks, he did all that playing in the form of overdubs, after recording Mayfield singing and accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. In song after song, she strums simple chords and sings in a matter-of-fact drawl that recallsEdie Brickell, ifBrickellhadn\'t slept in a couple of days. If Mayfield has lost sleep, it\'s because she (or the narrator who sings the songs) has romantic problems. Each song is sung by an \"I\" to a \"you\" with whom she is obsessed and who, for the most part, doesn\'t seem to be performing satisfactorily as a romantic partner. Not that the singer is entirely consistent in her attitude. Sometimes she expresses devotion, sometimes recrimination. \"I\'ll talk to whoever I God-damned wanna,\" she tells her boyfriend in \"We\'ve Never Lied\" (the song, by the way, makes it clear that they have), only to complain in \"Call Me,\" \"I spent the whole night by myself wondering who you talk to.\" If all of these songs are intended to represent a single relationship, it\'s certainly a complicated one. Maybe it\'s going great, maybe it\'s over, maybe it depends on what time it is.

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