Bosque Brown — Baby

Baby

Burnt Toast Vinyl

Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

03/05/2009 2:47pm

Bosque Brown is the perfect place to start if you're a Cat Power fan and need something to fill the void until she's over her covers phase. The two acts are so similar, in fact, that if you alternated songs from them on a mixtape, casual listeners wouldn't notice the slightest difference.

Bosque Brown are a band, but Baby's instrumentation is so scarce that they'll easily be mistaken for a solo project, fronted by singer and principal songwriter Mara Lee Miller. This is only the Texas-based group's second full-length, but they're already grasping for the coattails of Cat Power's lauded You Are Free.

It's refreshing to see a band put some thought into their record's arrangements. Baby includes three haunting a cappella numbers that divide the album into four distinct segments. Though these 13 songs are all Miller originals, several tracks sound eerily familiar. This is jarringly vulnerable stuff.

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