Oh Susanna ‘Soon The Birds’ – CHARTattack

By Scott Bryson (CHARTattack) April 21, 2011 3:46 pm

Only Suzie Ungerleider could write a song called “Drunk As A Sailor” and make it sound beautiful.

You can expect the usual gentle, rootsy folk from Oh Susanna’s fifth full-length, and as always, there’s a chiefly caustic album hiding under Soon The Birds’ serene surface. Ungerleider has no qualms about dropping lines like “get fucked on alcohol” and “You flipped the bird and mooned your meat” (both from standout ditty, “Your Town”).

The misery is relentless: engagement rings are hocked, families are abandoned, stagecoaches are robbed, people are murdered and the album ends with a widowing. Ungerleider mentions a “wheel of misfortune” in “Pretty Blue Eyes,” and that’s a decent way to describe this disc as a whole.

Despite all its despair, Soon The Birds is never a depressing album. Ungerleider and her pack of veteran musicians (Blue Rodeo’s Bazil Donovan, Kathleen Edwards guitarist Gord Tough and Weeping Tile drummer Cam Giroux) are working with too soothing a palette to ever create something somber. It’s almost tender enough to make you feel sorry for the robber/murderer in “By Rope” who gets caught and hanged.