Music history is littered with tragic tales of talented people robbed of their creative lives by sudden illness, injury, or death. A decade ago, North Carolina’s Reese McHenry nearly joined them. The singer, known in her local community for her hurricane vocals at the front of the band The Dirty Little Heaters, suffered four strokes, which resulted in a handful of heart surgeries and other complications that threatened to derail her career permanently.
These days, McHenry is as vivacious and healthy as ever, and she’s spent her recent years bouncing back with a vengeance. She returned to the fold with The Dirty Little Heaters, issued one LP in 2015 as The Second Wife, released a seven-inch as Reese McHenry & the Fox, and teamed up with the boisterous Spider Bags for a 2017 collaborative LP. With No Dados, her solo debut, McHenry delivers a cohesive and thrilling exhibition of her raw talent.
No Dados tumbles forth with “Magnolia Tree,” a rager that shifts gears while McHenry howls like the fierce offspring of Janis Joplin and Robert Plant. McHenry finds simpatico spirits with her backing band Drag Sounds: The band’s 2016 album, Sudden Comfort, is loose and easygoing, but here they floor the pedal, as if possessed by McHenry’s spirit.
Though McHenry’s powerhouse vocals make it difficult to read her as anything but a monolith of confidence, her songs churn with anxiety. “You think that things can’t get worse/But I’m here to tell you that they can,” she begins on “Murdered Love.” She frets about infidelity and disappointment, tempering bitterness and admissions of her own thorniness with pleas to make it all right again, closing “Can You Say?” with “What are we trying to do?/Can you say you don’t miss me at all?”
But even amid her worries, McHenry can serve up a heavyweight hook. Her “Oh-oh, this fever’s gotta go” refrain on “Fever” is an immediate earworm, as is the shout-along titular kiss-off of “Bye Bye Baby.” And as she sings “Why don’t you love me, baby?” on “Clogged and Idle Freeways,” McHenry braids together anger, despair, and menace with precision and sincerity. For most of her career, McHenry has flourished within her local music scene, but with the unapologetic might of No Dados, McHenry aims for bigger stages.
