The Grizzly Owls By Night On My Bedside WB rating out of 100

Throughout their debut album By Night On My Bedside, The Grizzly Owls grapple with a subject matter somehow too far removed from their chosen musical aesthetic to achieve much impact. From album art featuring ancient photographs and typeface, to song-titles suggesting imagined old-time contexts, The Grizzly Owls (wife/husband duo Jenny and Joseph Andreotti) seem determined to imbue a sense of old-world Americana to the proceedings. Problematically, they often employ neither the sonic nor lyrical palette to convincingly match these ambitions.

A lack of compositional ideas and slipshod production values are emblematic of the problems with By Night On My Bedside. The approach to both composition and production is reflected by the often-casual use of an old drum machine, which soon becomes tired and even cartoonish. Opener ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ features a cursory and cheesy beat coupled with a repetitive and clunky refrain (“I can’t live my entire life, livin’ in my head, livin’ in my head, livin’ in my head, until I’m dead”), which drags on needlessly and makes the song almost unlistenable well before it has run its course.

For all that, ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ is a standout track- coherent if overlong. Many of the poorer songs suffer from a lack of definiteness; if this is some kind of concept album, the source material – apparently inspired by their grandparents’ migration from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California – is flimsy at best. While most tracks are an intended snapshot into the mind of a protagonist from a bygone era, and as such are uniformly sung from Andreotti’s perspective, she is mostly unable as a vocalist to project (both literally and figuratively) the kind of voice needed for such necessarily universal tales. Handled by a more adept vocalist (Morrissey springs to mind), a lyric such as “could you love me if my breasts were a little bigger? Could you love me if you knew I existed?” (‘Oh Good God, How I Want That Man’) could impart a knowing irony. Andreotti’s inflection, however, is cloying.

By Night On My Bedside  does have its strong moments. Joseph Andreotti’s reverb-soaked, twangy guitars (think Johnny Cash’s early electric guitar sound) – omnipresent throughout the album – pleasantly attempt an American Gothic-like melodrama supportive of his wife’s wispy and detached vocal style. Furthermore, where the melodramatic streak is suppressed in favour of childish naïveté, reflected for example in the simple drum beat and lyrics of ‘I am a Child of the Dust Bowl’ (“I arrived in California, expecting to be the next big thing”), the results are quite successful. The breezy ‘Rifles and Hemlines’ better suits Andreotti’s vocal, with well-placed pedal steel and piano conjuring an almost tropical feel. The strongest tracks are aided by this much-needed pull between light and shade allowing Jenny’s girlish voice to breathe and her lyrics to sink in.

The more I listen to By Night On My Bedside the more I realise that there is a certain charm borne of nuance created by the peculiar atmosphere of the Andreotti union. Press accompanying the album states that with it the duo, who have been married four years and collaborated for seven (formerly as Calico Sunset), have ‘mastered the Grizzly Owls sound’. Indeed, By Night On My Bedside does assert itself of a strikingly unique aura. Unfortunately, this aura fails to imbue each cut with the requisite grandeur suggested by the chosen subject matter. Whispered lyrics are often masked by overly dense production and when heard, Andreotti’s vocal itself often is simply too affected to be taken seriously. The best tracks, however, represent a confidence of unified sound and spirit hinting that future attempts may mark a promising maturity for The Grizzly Owls.