Album: Bluebird
Artist: Jay Sparrow
(Royalty/BMG)
Three-and-a-half stars (out of five)
Every Edmonton musician ends up playing country music at some point in his or her career. Jay Sparrow used to flirt with the genre — in his former roots-rock band, Murder City Sparrows, and as a solo artist — then completely turned his back on it with his last album, White, an electro-pop experiment. For his first Royalty/Sony effort, Bluebird, the bearded troubadour goes full-on country, crafting a collection of rustic tunes with the help of guitarist Shaun Verreault, bassist Gordie Johnson and fiddler Denis Dufresne. Girls (All The Boys Want You), parties (Everything But Today), and Los Angeles (Kansas Twister) are the stars of some of Sparrow’s feel-good numbers — two-stepping with more reflective tunes about ghosts (Thanksgiving Night), breaking from your past (Bound By Nothing), and embracing wild rides (The Wind & The Risk). These are the standouts on the album, particularly the latter song, with its soul-gospel oohs, noisy guitar bursts and Sparrow’s whispers to a scream. “We’re better off they say / Staying out of the storm,” he bellows. “But I don’t know about that / ‘Cuz I like the rush / I like the way it tussles your hair up.” As for Bluebird’s other eight tracks, as well executed as they are, Sparrow ends up blending in with his country peers, not soaring above the crowd as he did with White and its unofficial anthem for Edmonton, Cold Winter Song.
