Cortney Tidwell - "The Missing Link"

One must delve beneath the surface of Ms. C. Tidwell’s work if one wishes to acquit oneself well when discussing it. One might easily be fooled by her Yankee aristocrat’s cognomen or equally by her provenance, being as she is the brat in a long line of Nashville performers. Her music sounds nothing like Fitzgerald reads or like the traditional country of her familial predecessors must have sounded. She has a reputation amongst those in the dark as a country singer of considerable power, and amongst those in the penumbra as a gifted country-shoegazer. Here in the light, it’s clear she’s more Morrissey than 4AD in delivery, though vice versa in arrangement (wash, not jangle). The instruments are heavy, the bass rumbling and round, the snare thumping, insistent, relieved on every sixteenth beat by a hissing high-hat. The genre: pop-rock. The singer: neither aristocratic nor otherwise, neither country nor shoegaze, the carefully belting Ms. C. Tidwell.

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