The title Big Star comes with pushcarts of baggage. In the early 1970s, the Memphis cult band took the name from a regional grocery store chain before creating records completely out of proportion with the inkling of stardom they actually achieved. Since then, so many acts-- the Replacements, Matthew Sweet, the Posies, et al.-- have played up the romance of Big Star-level obscurity that it's easy to miss that reference on Haley Bonar's fourth album, as she seems to take few musical cues from Alex Chilton or Chris Bell. She's much more folksy than pop, although Big Star sounds catchier and fuller than any of her previous albums. It's unclear whether she intends that title to carry a kernel of irony or if it's just a shrug and whatever. Is it a mission statement or a painful joke?
Bonar (rhymes with honor) is a fairly prolific singer-songwriter originally from small-town South Dakota but now holed up in the big Twin Cities. She plays almost all of the instruments on Big Star herself, produced the record, and sells her own hand-sewn t-shirts at live shows. More crucially, she possesses a voice that's ideal for conveying mixed emotions about romance, fame, life, what have you: On "Arms of Harm" and opener "Green Eyed Boy", she sounds freshly bruised and tender, but sings forcefully rather than quietly. Tempering that vulnerability is a natural wryness on "Better Half" and the country-tinged stand-out "Highway 16". She never sounds better than at the end of opener "Green Eyed Boy", singing wordlessly but emphatically as the song crashes around her.
Still, Big Star sounds like a glass-half-empty album, which isn't necessarily a complaint: Her previous album, 2006's Lure the Fox, was thematically bleaker and musically sparser-- a fatal combination then. Two years later she's crafting bigger hooks and a much more intricately textured folk-rock sound that swells and fades naturally with her voice, but she still sounds pre-jaded regarding any romantic or music-industry contract, despite the upward trajectory of her career. The title track is an anti-sellout anthem, told from a girlfriend's point of view: "Go out and get a haircut and stumble out into the morning/ They'll all hate you tomorrow when no one buys your single," she sings, before concluding: "I can't make you happy, I can't make you money/ I can only fold your laundry." But it's the chorus itself that sells the conceit of "Big Star": As the already spare instrumentation falls away, she projects those two words dramatically, straining just enough to convey her desperation.
Her flinty skepticism keeps Big Star from slipping into post-Lilith-isms (she bears more than a passing vocal semblance to 90s folk-pop singer Shawn Colvin), but it can be a bit much to take. Rock'n'roll, she sings on "Queen of Everything", "will tear you from the inside fuck with your spine, take you to the same place I lost my mind." Which raises the question: Why's she in this racket to begin with? She answers that question in the next song, the two-stepping "Highway 16". Leaving a good job and a good man, she hits the road on her own: "Hitting the highway is so sweet when it's nothing but you and your own two feet/ Who says life's weighed down to a rickety old town?" Bonar dreams of the same elusive freedoms as everyone else.
