Blanche: What This Town Needs - EP Review

Husband and wife team Dan and Tracee Miller head up Blanche, a Detroit alternative country rock band. The band have various other activities and interests such as Jack Lawrence's bass playing with the Raconteurs, Dan and Tracee's roles in the movie Walk The Line as Luther Perkins and wife, and Tracee's artwork which sells very well on her website.

Blanche's stated mission is: "To create, maintain and extend throughout the community high standards of musical standards."

From the name, the album cover and the bells outside at the start of the title track, I felt like I was in a cowboy movie. Dan and Tracee Miller then trade intense vocals over pedal steel guitar, banjo, raw guitar sounds, and sparse, driving drumming.

Child Of The Moon is much slower, less in your face track with the eerie pedal steel and banjo strumming making this a walk-home-after-a-long-day type of song.

Someday...


What impresses me most, surely purposely, is their ability to take you back in time. To when things were simpler, and clearer. Everything from their music's artwork, their website, to their sound and lyrics creates this.

The third track is the very harmonious and beautifully versed Scar Beneath The Skin. The most poetic and perfect example of this I feel is this verse:
"Floor board creaking once again
Each morning when your day begins
Brittle branches sprouted leaves
Wind chimes swaying in the breeze."

In order to get the beauty of it, you have to listen to the song. Sorry folks.

The EP finishes with more upbeat and energetic Never Again about love lost and taken for granted and a live version of Someday... which makes we want to see them live.

A good alternative country album which, with more listening, really grows on you.

They have an album due for release soon, which I look forward to.


Blanche website: www.blanchemusic.com/
Myspace Page: www.myspace.com/blanchedetroit