Amy Rude

Amy Rude
Snakeheart (Solid Gold)

by Melissa Smith

Amy Rude’s Snakeheart was recorded at a cemetery. Outside, apparently, since on several tracks the singing of crickets seeps through the microphone competing for last-note attention from the accordion, upright bass, and violin. Although comparisons will undoubtedly be made between Rude and her Tucson contemporaries, what makes Snakeheart and Rude so loveable resides in both the imperfection in the live feeling of the album and Rude’s knack for melody and drawled delivery that makes every song ultimately hummable.

The songs’ lyrics are free-form, stream of consciousness rambling, which is appropriate since Rude sounds somewhere between a female Will Oldham and a feminine early-nineties Stephen Malkmus with extreme back porch, lo-fi leanings. “Trigger” is a bookend to Cat Power’s “I Don’t Blame You,” only this time the narration is an ode to Willie Nelson’s famed guitar. The eerie, sparse sound of “Timbertown” features a moaning fiddle and a busted-up guitar under Rude singing “too drunk to dream.” It sounds like what some of the characters on Twin Peaks would have recorded if provided with four-tracks. The train-chugging, twangy strumming of “Get Up Now” is Rude trying to channel the spirit of a lost country legend, begging “sing to me now Patsy Cline.” Rude’s take on the Carter Family’s “Weeping Willow” is starkly different; it feels more like a cover of a jazz standard as opposed to the old-time favorite.

The only thing that Snakeheart desperately lacks is a change in sound — it relies so much on Rude’s evocative voice and the same instrumentation from song to song that it sometimes feels like one long ten-track song. But that long ten-track song is also the perfect soundtrack to a warm, late summer night.

- Venus Zine-2006

By ANNIE HOLUB

AMY RUDE
My Love Is a Velvet Farm (Self-Released)
Local singer/songwriter Amy Rude can do the full-band country-rock thing better than your average hip Canadian hack, but My Love Is a Velvet Farm sounds more like creative freak folk that several of our own homegrown musicians play: breathy, blended off-key vocals, sparse instrumentation, casually strummed guitars and the feeling of sitting in the backyard and playing for the creosote.

My Love Is a Velvet Farm is five original songs and two covers, and the fact that it was recorded in a motel in the Mojave Desert in June of last year is evident in the pace and texture: You can hear Rude's guitar pick hit the strings on the title track as a keyboard squeaks lazily in the background. You can almost hear the wind rustling in the Joshua trees on "Gold Rush in Germany," and the shuffling drums in the background on "Carnivorous" prickle the guitar. The percussion on "Bloom in Pioneer" sounds like dried branches clicking together, and Rude's voice sounds like a ghostly, girlish Carter sister.

"The West and transient myths pour from this desert," Rude writes in the liner notes, "To me, this is what songs are about: moments, isolation, security, fear, loss, myth, fantasy." Rude's cover of Jack Clement's "Miller's Cave" (à la the Gram Parsons version) is the most upbeat moment on the EP, and her cover of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" starts out shaky but is a logical summation: It ends the afternoon or evening porch jam on a relaxed note, invoking myth, security, isolation, loss, fear and fantasy all at once.
- Tucson Weekly

review from abus dangeroux in france (translated) this little album in its hand-painted cover comes straight out of Tucson. Inspired by the desolate ambiance of a solitary motel in the middle of the Mojave desert, these seven songs perfectly reflect the solitude, the heat and the will to get out of it both. An acoustic guitar, a tambourin, some bells and a little keyboard are the only companions to this young woman whose voice breaks on the essential "Only love can break your heart" of Neil Young. A new friend to be made on myspace and elsewhere - Abus Dangeroux