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Review: Performing Songwriter Magazine
Name: Violet
Label: Wine & Vinyl Records
Title: We Both Know It's Out There

Violet's music is sophisticated and persuasive with an ability to be breezy and serious at the same moment. The songwriting duo of Meredith Minogue and Jim Barry creates pliant and supple pop with shades of Cowboy Junkies and Yo La Tengo, though more cosmopolitan than the first and more alert than the latter. Minogue's voice is entirely intoxicating and reminiscent of Over the Rhine's Karin Berquist in an unearthly, smart, aloof way. Barry works his way through a knee-high pile of instruments on We Both Know It's Out There -- including guitars, mandolin, glockenspiel, woodblocks, tambourines, and everything but the small assortment he leaves for the capable sidemen who fill the record out. The songs on this record run the emotional and musical gamut from mournful minor key supplications to jangly, banjo-enhanced pop bounces to dark love/hate recriminations and meditations. Violet is texturally complex and lyrically ambitious without losing its sense of fun or taking itself too seriously. Whether it's studying the sky in "Twilight Sleep" or indicting a less-than-likable narrator in "Gift," Minogue and Barry deliver an impressive and habit-forming record.

-- Clay Steakley

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