[rating=4.00]
Long Island born and Nashville based modern country folk singer-songwriter Mindy Smith has returned with her sophomore album – Long Island Shores. This effort is the follow up to her debut One Moment More which garnered the respect of the Nashville country music community with her cover of Dolly Parton’s hit single “Jolene.” On Long Island Shores, Smith pervades her distinctly gentle voicing amidst soft modern country ballads and light gales of folk-pop textures. Songs like “Edge Of Love” and “Please Stay” are slowly stirred into a country waltz with shuffling snare drums and intervals of whining steel guitars. Her instinct for driving her vocal melodies and placing vocal hooks across dainty rhythmic mounds and furrows of fiddle motions are guided by intuition on numbers like “Tennessee” and the title track. The feminine grace in her voice is elegantly swirled like a pixie’s touch, and yet discernibly humble and burdened by melancholy.
Smith’s duet with Buddy Miller on “What If The World Stops Turning” binds her delicately pitched vocals to his rugged tones. The bluesy wags in the rhythmic steps on “You Know I Love You Baby” color the guitar raptures and Smith’s vocal chromatics with a heady ember, while the dark country folk hues and deep drum fills on “I’m Not The Only One Asking” takes Smith’s vocal keys into lower registers. The warm country sprigs and bucolic riffs of “Peace Of Mind” concludes Long Island Shores with an openness and vulnerability reflective of Patty Griffin and Rachel Proctor showing that Mindy Smith’s pastorals are willfully open about human emotions and perceptively in tune with their wavelength.
