Customer Reviews

Snow on the Waves

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great debut album by an up and coming artist. It is one of those rare combinations of great lyrics, awesome music and Ms. Hayes' voice is angelic. It is no wonder the Washington Post named her one of the top ten new local artists to watch in 2001.

I am blown away every time I listend to Snow on the Waves by Meghan Hayes. Her voice is truly beautiful. Her lyrics are deep and meaningful. I can listen to her CD over and over all day long. I am lucky enough to live in the DC area, so I have also been able to hear her live. If you live within a days drive of DC, I highly recommend making the trip to hear her perform.

I was lucky to have been introduced to Hayes' music at a college reunion. Despite the alumni connection, I confess that it took a few listens before I started to like the album (and I did come to like it a lot).

At first The lyrics seemed cryptic and overly abstract in their imagery: "You sing like a windchime /
Cut in half by the fine line"; and I felt Hayes was using a gritty singing and production style when I wanted to hear something like Sarah McLaghlin.

The lyrics are worth the time it takes to mull them over (the album really should come with a lyric sheet!), and the ones that don't quite make sense to me still ring true emotionally: "Oh City... ...If you'll be the one to wear the neon lights/
I'll be the one to hail the cab".

The music adds some balm to the often bleak subject matter, and keeps things up-tempo and flowing while staying enmeshed to the songs' emotional content.

All in all, if you've found yourself in a musical slump, half-heartedly listening to the same 5 or 6 sometime-favorite albums, Snow on the Waves might be just the thing to make it all fresh again.

Snow on the Waves is all achingly-emotional vocals, unshakeable melodies and trenchant wordplay, served up with honest summer-porch charm. On lovely, honky-tonk-tempo ballads like "Twice As Long," "Citadel" and "Debt to Love," Hayes demonstrates a rare gift for enduring melodic hooks and evocative storytelling. Hayes' songs are populated with smalltown strivers and survivors, trying to find an edge in lives that just keep throwing them curves, lives that are "all rain/and no parade." Stuck in temporary accomodations, phoning from rest stops and passing lanes, they are stranded between thwarted expectations and fading memories, and Hayes mines the melancholy of their predicaments to wonderful musical effect. Her voice is gentle and expressive and neatly splits the difference between the manic homespun folkie charm of Danielle Howle and the ethereal delicacy of Sara McLachlan, while her desolate, dead-on imagery -- the "leather-shoe winter" of "Get Off On a Dare" -- provides the intellectual punctuation to the swell and sway of her musicians, an ensemble that provides immaculate settings for her songs without ever once upstaging or undermining her. To hear Snow on the Waves is to be in presence of a ripening, but already confident and compelling, new talent.

Monotonous and slow. Does not live up to the reviews given here.