"There's something about The Roches that's always tended to provoke
extreme reactions. People either love their swooping three-part harmonies
and folksy-neurotic humor, or they want to flee to another time zone.
Put me firmly in the former camp -- at least when it comes to their lush
and fabulously quirky early studio albums, "The Roches" (1979)
and "Keep on Doing" (1982). To my mind, though, the Roches'
finest album is perhaps their least known -- a rarely-seen 1975 recording
by Maggie and Terre Roche (sister Suzzy joined a few years later) titled
"Seductive Reasoning." Earthier and more unfettered than anything
the trio has done since, "Seductive Reasoning" (which was re-released
in 1981 with a new album cover, shown here) is not only among the most
underrated folk-rock albums of the 1970's, it's a minor classic.
This is the album that got me through college. Maggie and Terre Roche
weren't much older than me when they recorded it, and the songs -- which
are littered with comic and poignant references to drugs, telephone bills,
interracial romance, landlords, contraceptive pills -- express a level
of political and moral confusion that's often missing from their later
work. They're the songs the smart/pensive narrators of some of Jayne Anne
Phillips's early short stories, and her novel "Machine Dreams,"
would have written if they could.
The songs on "Seductive Reasoning" run the gamut from stark
ballads ("West Virginia," about a suicide, is so quiet you can
hear the piano's pedals working) to fast and funny rave-ups such as "If
You Emptied Out All of Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change,"
which was produced by Paul Simon and features both the Muscle Shoals Rhythm
Section and the Oak Ridge Boys.
Most of the songs strike someplace in the middle, however, with Maggie's
wryly subversive lyrics steering the duo clear of sentimental overload.
On the lovely ballad "Down the Dream," about a white woman who's
running away from her life to hitchhike with her black lover, the singer
reminds herself that "there are some things to fall back on, like
a knife, or a career." And in "Underneath the Moon," Maggie's
and Terre's voices combine for the following observation: "Good men
want a virgin, so don't give yourself too soon/ Except in an emergency,
like underneath the moon." "Seductive Reasoning" brims
with these kind of moments; its title, in fact, says it all."
(Dwight Garner)
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