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Christine Fellows

Nevertheless (Six Shooter)

By Christine Werthman
Published: May 29th, 2008 | 12:34pm

Christine Fellows sings with a voice borrowed from a bright-eyed little girl. It might be aged by a slight rasp and the lyrical themes of apocalypse, voyeurism and death, but the sunny tones in Fellows’ singing give her music a child-like quality, albeit a precocious child who’s seen well beyond the playground. On Nevertheless, her fourth album, Fellows shows off a quirky style of storytelling set to intriguing arrangements and interspersed with stunning instrumentals.

Nevertheless’s title came from a poem by Marianne Moore, famed American poet, known as much for being a spinster as for her honest and observant poetry. Fellows paraphrases snippets of Moore's work in the track “What Makes the Cherry Red,” which uses rapidly repeated, low cello and piano sounds to build tension before Fellows’ bright voice cuts in and is followed up by melodic violins and plinking xylophones. The instrumentation on this track, and especially on the fully instrumental opener, “Let Us Have Done With the Umbrella of Our Contagion,” gives the impression that Fellows is the type of musician who carefully picks each sound to mesh, build and lead the song somewhere. Even without her impressive lyrics, the music alone is enough to tell a story.

Fellows’ ability to spin a yarn with her words is not unlike that of the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy. Each song is a vignette, taking listeners into the life of a homebody in “Saturday Night On Utopia Parkway,” out to the farm of an elderly lady who plays Gershwin for her chickens in “The Spinster’s Almanac," and through the life of a woman named Betty, whose obituary Fellows supposedly once found in her coat pocket. The album features the stories of a number of unmarried females, and Fellows cares for her characters. Their stories seem to fascinate her, and the album comes off as an homage to quirky independents and solitary women.

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