(Mint Records, digital, LP, cassette)
You know that song "Put on a Happy Face" from Bye Bye Birdie? Beneath its ultra-catchy veneer, it's basically musical theater's peppy treatise on men telling women to smile more. Hooray?
Why do people feel the relentless need to mask their emotions? And why is there so much external pressure to do so? Montréal's Nora Kelly seems to ponder these questions on her band's upcoming LP, Rodeo Clown. In press materials, she says she often feels like the titular face-painted goons, whose unknowable inner lives are hidden beneath goofy, showy antics.
The same is true of all clowns, but Kelly aligns the metaphor with her group's snarling country style. Outfitted with the genre's signature sounds — fiddle, banjo, slide guitar — the album's 10 tracks illuminate Kelly as a bighearted outlaw who's duty bound to shoot straight and rustle up some keen observations about the world and her place in it.
Like those of contemporaries Jenny Lewis and Caroline Rose, Kelly's honest musings eschew cloying earnestness with stinging wit and whimsy. She's brusque when she needs to be but plenty gentle, too.
Opener "Mmm-Delicious" finds Kelly chewing on a mouthful of her own ego. The thumping barnstormer encapsulates the whole record: cheeky bon mots ("I'll just eat my pride / Mmm-delicious / You're acting so suspicious / Trying to find out my motivations"), rip-roaring power chords that punctuate transitions and winding harmonies.
With its sighing slide guitar, "Horse Girl," one of the album's early singles, is a cool outlaw-country ditty that name-checks Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt. Full of longing as well as snark ("I always tip my waiter but I've never tipped a cow"), the song showcases Kelly's craving for a life of plows, shit-kicking boots and riding the range.
The party reaches fever pitch on the all-too-brief "Purgatory Motel," which chronicles tour life — a happy place that can feel interminable. Over a hearty train-shuffle beat, Kelly and a horde of revelers celebrate their infernal fates. The happy lot of misfits whoops it up hoedown-style, surrounded by a bouncing bass line and twangy guitars.
Things get a bit darker on the album's title track. An uncanny minor key and slanted riffs enhance the song's — and, perhaps, the entire album's — blunt message: "People die / We've gotta go / And in the end all we've got to show for it are objects." Kelly seems to say our material selves both do and don't indicate what we feel inside.
Rodeo Clown will be available at mintrecs.com and on all major streaming platforms on Friday, August 25. Nora Kelly Band performs on Saturday, August 26, at Foam Brewers in Burlington.