Georgia cultivates a particularly introverted breed of indie singer-songwriter, especially if the artist in question is female and plays an acoustic guitar, if she whispers shyly and coyly into the mic, and if she writes self-deprecating lyrics that reveal her insecurities. Listening to Madeline's new mini-album The Slow Bang, which follows her 2003 debut Kissing and Dancing, it's impossible not to hear Atlanta-born Chan Marshall or Rome's Liz Durrett, who both share her home state as well as her penchant for hushed vocals and minimal arrangements. Madeline is more playful, certainly, and less shy than either, acting like she might actually enjoy the attention that performing and recording bring. So songs like the disarming opener "Sleeping Dogs", the nearly anthemic "Good Houses", and delicate closer "Simple Words" sound lively even when they're barely there and mordantly witty when they're most sincere. She probably even addresses the audience when she plays them live.
Unfortunately, Madeline often treats precocity as an end in itself. Again and again on The Slow Bang, she falls for the showy line or the look-at-me phrasing. On "Fish in the Sea", which features a choir of Georgia crickets supporting one of her beguiling melodies, she actually sings, "I've been huntin' and bitches be frontin'/when they limp like some wounded beast." That the song is comforting a lovelorn friend only makes it sound more ironic and therefore more problematic. Her quirky poise falls away, and Madeline sounds like another sorority girl with a fruity-drink buzz flashing gang signs and peppering her slurred speech with dawg. That moment-- a gouge in the canvas-- nearly ruins the entire album.
However, it does show that Madeline is in the world, not apart from it. Rather than shutting herself in her bedroom to write and record-- which is the impression many of her peers, Georgian or not, give-- Madeline draws gregariously from her indie contemporaries, which gives her a surprisingly large musical vocabulary. The Slow Bang is, after all, released by Orange Twin, which is run by Elf Power, and features significant contributions from Matthew Houck of Athens-based Phosphorescent. "Uncle's Sweetheart Pt. 2" begins with Madeline playing acoustic and singing plaintively (i.e., no different than most other songs here), but then curveballs into a roots-rock, gospel-derived chorus that wouldn't be out of place on a Mary Chapin Carpenter song. That's no dig-- it's the largest, warmest moment on the album. On the other hand, that same worldliness motivates her to attempt a song like "The Demise of Madame Butterfly", whose clunky theatricality not only annoys listeners, but distances them from the artist. Madeline ought to let the Decemberists be the Decemberists. She has enough personality to make a whole album just by being herself.
