Paula Eve Kirman is a freelance writer and Web designer from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In the information accompanying her first album, Today I Lit a Candle, she states that it is composed of eight songs written over the last eight years. It pains me to say this, but this CD screams "amateur" even down to the label and liner, obviously printed on a computer.

The title song is Kirman's response to the fifth anniversary vigil of the 1989 killing of 14 people in her hometown. As I was first listening to the song on the first anniversary of America's own disaster, I really wanted to identify with the song. Perhaps the surrounding mood lifted my expectations too high, but on first listen, the song appears to be nothing more than her just free-associating. Now, I understand that great songs are often the product of such a situation, but crafting process is needed to get everything just right. This suffers from its absence.

Another song that should have had potential weight was "Shoah," from the Hebrew word for Holocaust. "This is for my generation and for future generations," she says in the liner notes. Unfortunately, instead of being universal, it merely comes across as generic. Except for a few choice words, it could easily be another version of the title song.

"Waves," at least, had a catchy tune I found myself humming. But mostly there is nothing special about this collection. It's not bad, per se, it's just not good, either. Her lyrics tend away from the lyrical and her music has more range than her voice. She has a deep resonance and her attempts to sing in a high register produce grimaces. There is a producer credit but no sign of his existence. The levels on voice and guitar are identical and unchanging. Some songs would definitely have benefited from some additions. In "Shoah," I kept thinking "a cello would be perfect here" but it never arrived. It would have lent the song an ominous feel that would have more successfully delivered the point. Someone has forgotten that atmosphere is as important as lyrical content.

But through all this, there is one redeeming value. One ingredient that threads across the album and keeps this from being a total waste of plastic. Not enough to recommend purchase, unfortunately, but certainly enough to watch out for Kirman in the future. There is heart in this record. Kirman obviously feels strongly about these songs and their subjects, and this enthusiasm comes through. She simply needs the quality of the product to match the quality of her ideas.

Bones by Heather Shayne Blakeslee, however, is an album by a woman who knows exactly what she is doing. Bones is a solid debut by a powerful new voice. She, her guitar, her story songs, and a few friends for depth of sound add up to a full experience. Her music runs the gamut of blues, country blues, and straight folk, but her lyrics and her ability to get inside the mind of her characters are what really bring this above the norm.

There is a theme of loneliness that permeates the album, illustrated by the liner, containing photographs that show her walking solo through a field of fallen leaves. They are notable in that they are almost completely void of Blakeslee's face.

The album begins with "Sequoia," a song about a seventeen year old who is abandoned by her parents and chooses to make the best of it. It has probably the best metaphor on the album, lyrical and instantly appropriate:

I have made my body strong like a drum,
and now the harder that you beat me,
the louder I become.

Another song about abuse is the Appalachian-style tune, "The Ballad of Anna Mae." The dobro rules this song, as it should, and the producer shows restraint in knowing--here and throughout--when to bring the guitar to the front and when to leave it behind Blakeslee's powerful voice.

The titular theme of "bones" is dispersed throughout the album ("Opiates & Envy" contains the line "cooled my hot bones down," and in "Lazarus"--which sounds almost classical--the character is "tired to the bone") and this culminates in the title track, a simple album-ender, once again about loneliness ("I sit here alone with these bones.")

One standout in particular is "No Rain." This is possibly the saddest song I've ever listened to. Luckily for me (as I was about to cry on the commuter train), she breaks the mood with "Letter to a Lover," a more uplifting piece, musically at least. Using an actual drum kit for the first time, it really raises the simple guitar piece full of questions to near-anthemic status while the lyrics remain about sad love ("What if you were America? What if I...lived pretending patriot? Would I go on and on...to kiss your bitter ground?"). So it's a mixed blessing, but still as powerful in its own way.

I really enjoyed Bones, especially in comparison to the disappointment of Kirman's album. But the real gem in this batch comes from Tim Grimm. A sometime actor whose film career (he has appeared in films like Clear and Present Danger, generally as an authority figure) has been doing so well that Grimm had not recorded an album in over eight years.

It was worth the wait. Heart Land, a title as simple as it is a complete definition of its contents, is an amazing portrait. While Blakeslee shows wonderful craftsmanship, Grimm's music seems to have a life of its own.

Grimm describes himself on his Web site as a "singer-songwriter, actor, hay-farmer" and from the first track--the classic-in-the-making "Better Days"--I was transported to a place where people still make their living from the land and through hard backbreaking work. A place where small events have drastic consequences, where the little people still suffer the effects of government action. Although his sentiments run a little heavy-handed at times (as in "South of the Border"), the genuine feeling of struggle and the strong emotion Grimm has for his subjects are such that a little melodrama can be easily forgiven.

This is easily the best album I've heard all year. It's an album of beauty, an album of pain, and an album that filled me with wonder. It's one of those albums that comes along once in a blue moon that make you trip all over yourself trying to find new words for "magnificent" and "wonderful." It brings emotions up in me that I thought music would never bring up again, emotions I am hard pressed to find words for, save that they are sometimes almost overwhelmingly strong. And an album that can make me feel that way--whether I enjoy the feeling or not--is an album of which I am in awe.

Grimm writes about characters, meaning to say that Grimm often writes in character, barring a statement about his recent time spent in Hollywood ("Too Hard Drivin'"). But that does not take away from the personal touch of the music. Each song is a picture of a small event. In "She Remembers," (my favorite) a widow's children want her to move into town and she reminisces about her past life, only three months gone:

She remembers all that went before
She remembers laughing, running through the corn
She remembers every baby being born
And him holding her late at night dancing across the floor

Though I am thankfully unfamiliar with the situation, I can feel every ounce of pain in this woman, and I think that is a tribute to Grimm's use of words and music to sculpt art from sound. I immediately thought of Johnny Cash's work, past and present, but that does not give Grimm his due. He is a purely original songwriter with insight that escapes the more pedestrian of his ilk.

[Craig Clarke]

Tim Grimm