Boca Chica – Lace Up Your Workboots
self-released 2009
Listen while reading:
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Boca Chica – the name of a Pittsburgh/Pennsylvania based band that released their second full-lenght album this year Septrember 18th. Boca Chica (literally meaning “small mouth”) is a municipality of the Santo Domingo province in the Dominican Republic. But as far as I can see the music got nothing to do with it – and I also won’t name all the people which are involved, i’ll just copy it from their MySpace site where they write: “Boca Chica is Hallie Pritts and Susanna Meyer and Jeff Baron and Ricky Moslen and Greg, James, other Jeff, Matt, Christopher, Lisa, Josh, other Josh, and once a third Josh, Neal, Dave, other Dave, Drew, that one time Jules and Paul, sometimes all of Cuddle Magic, and probably some others too.” Ok, now you know that, we can go on to the music itself.
Their current release is called Lace Up Your Workboots and you can call it a bluegrass influenced folk pop record. This is the resaon why we are going away from the reduced one artist – one guitar shema for today and walk along for example with some nice strings, percussions, a steel guitar, an acoustic guitar of course, a banjo, a piano and a cello.
The variety of the instruments used opens up the possibilty for them to create very different sounding songs, such as the forward pushing and fabulous opener Lake Erie with it’s beautiful cello playing or the more balladesque Pins And Needles with the really nice country jaunt at the end. Sometimes you also feel a portion of folk rock as in Shake Your Party Dress – but me likes the quiet and chary tracks a bit more.
Hallie Pritts (performing)
Speaking about the instruments I have to mention the wonderful voice of Hallie Pritts. The melodies she’s singing are so clear and lovely that you must love her singing immedately. Just listen to Minneapolis and you know what I’m talking about. For me this is the best track on the album, but with best I mean best together with say Mount Erie and Valentine and Workboots. But this does not disqualify the other tracks, they are very good as well. All together this is a really nice album and there is just one thing I don’t like so much – and I’m talking about The Hourglass Waltz here. The track can’t reach the quality of the other tracks because the bassdrum sounds incongruously and the electrical baublery at the end can’t convince me at all. But maybe it’s just me who dosn’t like this and therefore you should listen for yourself.
So, if you want a really nice and rich alt country folk pop album head over to cdbaby.com and get your copy of Lace Up Your Workboots there. For more information about the band visit Boca Chica’s MySpace site. – The last words of this post are dedicated to the cover artwork: This is one of the best artworks I’ve seen in 2009. I think if I would spot it at a record store I would have to buy it automatically. Terrific.
