Review Summary: Emmylou Harris opens the 90s with a fair-to-middling release that holds little portent of the greatness to come
Brand New Dance isn’t a bad album by any stretch, its got all the ingredients for a successful Emmylou Harris album and enough variety in sound that it should be a strong showcase for the variety of expression her voice is capable of. The kind of sound that makes for a quality Emmylou release should be apparent at this point in her career: warm production, live atmosphere, and songs that give Emmylou the chance to show the more emotive qualities of her vocals, and most of those boxes have been checked on this album, but there’s a lifeless, flat quality to the whole thing that makes it feel like Emmylou was kind of just phoning it in on this release. The stylistic limitations of the genre means that the great strength of a given country album is going to be in interpretation and delivery, and here Emmylou just doesn’t seem to have the drive to make the ten tracks of the album anything more than solid, professional renditions. Tougher Than the Rest, along with the title track are a cut above the rest of the album, but even they don’t carry the kind of fire that makes Emmylou’s best work so unforgettable. The most one can say about the former track is that it does justice to Springsteen while still remaining true to Emmylou’s strengths, but how many covers had she recorded before this point that did exactly that and more?
Sure the production’s glossy and a hair too smooth, something that was pretty common for her releases at this point in her career, but it really isn’t the detriment to the album in the way it was on some of her earlier releases. The backing band, while tending towards the same kind of phoned-in quality that Emmylou’s giving us is still a strong enough backing that shows there is a potential for something, if not great, then at least better-than-average about these song selections, and that, with a consistently more heartfelt vocal delivery Brand New Dance might have been listed among her better albums. As it stands, only the aforementioned Tougher Than the Rest and Brand New Dance really shows us the Emmylou who was capable of inducing tears in her listeners. The latter song, a heartfelt song of reconciliation written by her ex-husband and erstwhile producer Paul Kennerley, features the strength, grit and warmth that all the best of Harris’ songs feature, with a welcome change of pace in the form of a tin whistle/uilleann pipe solo. It’s a strong moment in an album that barely rises above decent, but the rest of the album might be considered better than average if not for the fact that Emmylou has demonstrated on many occasions that she is capable of much, much more.
