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Sandy Dillon

East Overshoe

Label: One Little Indian

abell by Amy Bell March 18th, 2001

With an undoubted life highlight playing jazz piano to legendary playwright Tennessee Williams, Sandy Dillon’s musical career has been slow to take off ever since those perfomances decades ago - and this album pretty much explains why.

Having been described as ‘PJ Harvey’s little sister’ (despite being, like, years older), the comparison is not inaccurate, if you only take the backwoods, grizzled-blues-momma aspect of Polly’s work and neglect the gazillion other facets. For a more apt comparison of ‘East Overshoe’ (even if I do say so myself) would be ‘Trout Mask Replica’ (ie. hard work) with faux-Southern Gothic lyrics and vocals by Cyndi Lauper doing a hoarse-throated impression of performance-art shriek-queen Diamanda Galas (ie. bloody hard work).

If you can get past Sandy’s love-it-or-loathe-it voice, you’ll be rewarded with sufficiently gritty slide guitar(although when has that ever made an album?), and ‘Second Dad’ is catchy in a redneck bar-room band from Hell kind of way. But it’s all much of a muchness, lapsing into tuneless, grating sludge towards the end; proving that a poor facsimile/pisstake of dem old swamp blues is no match for the real thang. Put it this way – Sandy Dillon’s artistic scope is admirable and makes a refreshing change from the Hear’says and Limp Bizkits of this world; but that admiration is unlikely to become love. Disappointing.

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