Edie Carey--Great Voice, Bland Songs

EDIE CAREY

Bring the Sea

Edie Carey 50185-5

**

What a voice! Edie Carey has a glorious set of pipes, sweet, lovely, and enough bottom to give it texture and muscle. I’d love to hear her use it on better material. It would be wrong to say that the songs on Bring the Sea all sound the same—it’s more that they all have exactly the same feel. Seriously, you could randomly select three tracks from this CD, play them, and five minutes later you’d not recall a thing about any of them other than the fact that you sure did like Carey’s voice! Evan Brubaker’s single-note production is what you’d get if music was manufactured on an assembly line. The musicianship is safe, generic, and mid-tempo from start to finish—the sort of thing one expects from the house band of a talk show. Carey has the talent to be a major force—but not with these songs. She needs to work with a co-writer who can sharpen the edges, and a producer who forces her to shovel some grit. In this case, too safe is too bad.