Janet Batch – You Be the Wolf
There are stories in those hills.
John Tierney
June 1, 2022
Country, Americana, Singer-Songwriter, call it what you will. I was never one for labels. Regardless of genre, I have always been drawn to music with credibility and talent. It doesn’t hurt to have lyrics like poetry.
Ithaca’s Janet Batch checks every one of those boxes on her recent release You Be the Wolf, an album that sounds like where it’s from. Stories that can be found in the twists and turns of upstate New York’s back roads, small towns, and hamlets miles away from the Thruway. There are stories in those hills, some joyful, some crazy and some touched by pure evil. Until you have skipped the highway for local roads as you cross this state, you have never truly seen Upstate New York.
“You Be the Wolf” is an album that gets its claws into you the more you listen to it.
Batch uses words to paint such a vivid picture in “If I Had a Nickle”. You can almost smell the stale beer and the smarmy look on the douchebag antagonist in this song about unwanted attention and disrespectful men.
Batch possesses a voice that can be both playful and warm, as on the stomping “It’s so Easy” which is followed up by the charming and twisted “Lovetta” and jaunty little song about a woman getting dressed up, “putting on her red honeymoon lipstick”, wrapping herself in plastic and heading off to the woods to die. (That this is my favorite might say more about me than I’d like it to.)
“Got No Idea” about a woman in an unfulfilling relationship and isn’t sure what to do about it is an absolute foot stomper.
“Radio” is the kind of song that should be a breakthrough single if this world were fair and just. With her soaring voice in front of an almost Angelo Badalamenti meets Chris Isaac arrangement.
The album’s closer “Sara Anne” is a song about a little girl from not so far from here, who should have been hitting her 40’s right about now had she not been scooped up by the face of evil never to been seen again. She was 12. Her disappearance was the talk of a heartbroken region back then and made national headlines. Her kidnapper has confessed to the crime but her remains, believed to be somewhere in the Adirondacks have never been found. “Sara Anne” is an open letter, or maybe even a prayer between Batch and the missing girl that as much as it speaks of hope and wonder about how hard it must be to be in those mountains alone for 25 years, at the same time the song almost seethes with anger at a creator that would allow such evil to extinguish such innocence. A song, that as I write this, resonates perfectly in the current moment.
The album is full of stories of sadness, hope, hopelessness, and love and frequently very funny. Janet Batch is truly a wonderful writer, songs or otherwise. The stories she tells are human and emotional, like three-minute movies of the imagination. You Be the Wolf is a short story anthology set to music. The characters are painted so vividly you can almost see them. The songs are sweet, sad, and funny and sometimes all three of those things at once.
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Janet Batch & The Four Bangers play at The 443 Social Club and Lounge on June 11th at 7PM, tickets are still available.
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