Young Blood Blues

Alynda Lee embodies the folk ideal. At a time when much "folk music" has become the province of self-serious beardy auteurs content to ply their heartsick wares on the coffeehouse circuit, Alynda has a worried mind and a restless heart. She ran away from her Bronx home at age 17 and, like Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott before her, started riding freight trains, making acquaintances as she roamed from town to town and sleeping out at night underneath the big open sky. She eventually ended up in New Orleans, where she made money by playing washboard for a street band called the Dead Man's Street orchestra. Over time, washboard became banjo and Lee went from side player to central figure, forming Hurray for the Riff Raff to give voice to the song in her heart.

Young Blood Blues is the second Hurray for the Riff Raff record, and it's their first masterpiece. Stark, stirring and evocative, it capably summons both early Cat Power and Margaret Johnson while being clearly beholden to neither. Make no mistake: this is Alynda's world, and she gave life to the characters that inhabit it. Some of them are just shadows: "I saw your ghost in the grocery," is how the record opens, and even the characters on Young Blood who still have a beating heart seem only half-alive. In the lovely, lilting "Slow Walk" — which, if you weren't listening closely, you'd mistake for a love song — Lee sings, "You stick the needle in your arm and your baby starts crying," before warning, "it's a slow walk from the bottom to the top." Happiness is a boon to some, but in Lee's world "Too much of a good thing will make you numb" — a warning she delivers atop a banjo that spirals like a baby's musical mobile.

Coming from anyone else's lips this would all be pretty dire, but Lee's warm voice places her as the latest in a long line of blues singers who can express heartache without sounding overly-morose. She acknowledges that lineage in the haunting title track, describing the ache of her years as the "young blood blues" and announcing that her "best friend in the whole world/ is a man who's dead and gone."

Sparse is the watchword: most of the songs consist of little beyond Alynda's banjo and her warm, ragged voice. But that's somehow enough: there's a delicate beauty that makes them irresistible — they glow like gas lanterns in an old barn, steady and serene. In Lee's hands, even the saddest thoughts feel sweet and vital and — above all else — true.