Postcards From Downtown

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know – and blues-folk singer-songwriter Dayna Kurtz is not uninclined to flash her little black book. A great friend of folk legend Richie Havens, here on backing vocals, Kurtz is also a ‘veteran’ of the ‘downtown New York café scene’ that ‘gave rise’ to Jeff Buckley, as if his ineffable, one-off genius emanated from anywhere other than himself.

Kurtz clearly took furious notes during that period: her own husky waver owes more than a little to a certain much-missed wayward falsetto. Sadly however, that doesn’t stop Postcards From Downtown from being rife with badly used third-hand ideas, depressingly parochial and strung together with dead words still box-fresh from the cliché factory. Men are men (‘scared to fly’, etc), basses are upright, strings and accordions wheeze away 20 to the dozen and foreign languages – y’know, to give a bit of an exotic European feel – are used incorrectly (Italians will be interested to learn that ‘heart’ is spelled and pronounced ‘coré’, not cuore. Silly eyeties).

Then there’s ‘Somebody Leave A Light On’, ostensibly a paean to Jeff but in fact an utterly presumptuous, horrible slab of barstool-kicking Complaint Blues (“He was blessed/The best of us/He was beautiful and stupid/He’d go swimming with his boots on”). When Richie Havens’ rough, life-worn vibrato swells up, on its own, for one brief verse, the undeniable skin-pimpling noise of true talent makes you catch your breath. Then, just as quickly as it appears, it’s gone.