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Named for the famous female sharpshooter and member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Annie Oakley is actually an Oklahoma trio comprising twin sisters Sophia and Grace Babb, who took up music as an outlet after their father’s death, on guitars and vocals with Nia Personette, who also lost her father shortly before joining, on violin and harmony.
Their second full-length album charts a personal journey from youth to womanhood, opening with the waltz-time Pomp and Swell and its unbridled air of youthful daring and optimism only for the glow of love to fade (“You just look so bored, you can’t sit still with me”) in the circling patterns of Recognition.
The realities of the 9-5 life weigh heavy on the sweetly harmonised and banjo-flecked folksy Brother and the tribulations (“A cold hard-wooded floor/A mattress set up there/A pocket of pocket change/A few beers to help me bear”) when you find yourself “walking against wind.”
Good Thing has a bluesy slow and sluggish groove to underscore lyrics about emotional numbness (“I just want to feel something/I just want to feel anything”) while, returning to an acoustic strum, a languidly waltzing Did You Dream circles the doubts that can creep upon a relationship that one may not be as committed as the other (“Did you dream about me as much?”).
The electric guitars cast more threatening, harder musical shapes with Into The Light, Grace’s response to being consumed by an overwhelming sudden sense of love but with lyrics again concerned with whether the timelines of a relationship run parallel or diverge, continuing to tread the path of self-blaming unease (“Sometimes I lack the courage/To look straight in the face/Of mistakes that deserve recognition”) even though “Your mouth tastes like mercy/Even when I fail to try.”
One of the album’s most striking tracks is If I Were a Ghost, spare plangent guitar chords anchoring a wrenching lyric of regret and loss, written by Sophie from the experience of living with a grief-stricken mother, as the sisters sing of haunting “the hallways that I used to love”, recalling how “We used to spend all our nights talking now I just wander, wanting to find the voice that I left in our doorway saying goodbye.”
The aftermath of a separation continues into Missed Connection with hushed vocals, brittle piano notes and melancholic violin, baldly contrasted by the deep, echoey guitar notes that underpin the subsequent Nothing To Say and its return to the death throes of love (“I’m just trying to find the reasons why/We make each other feel alone/You lick your wounds, I open mine/We can’t hold our own”) with its suggestions of mental isolation.
Sometimes poking the wounds or picking the scabs is all you have to remind you you’re still alive, and that seems to be the idea behind the softly sung The Curse, a deceptively light and drifting musical tone that stands in stark relief to the confession of how “Now in each city, every goddamn city I remember/And I’d like to say I avoid them/But I won’t, and I couldn’t just the same/In fact, I love the bitter memories/Of when I spoke sweet your name.”
The album finally gets round to the circling metronomic guitar notes of the title track and its central theme of how relationships can rise or fall because, scared of being taken the wrong way, we don’t say the words we mean only to often say the ones we don’t, ending with the bittersweet line “I can’t help but hurt you/When I say I have to go, again/So we’ll never say the words we mean.”
It ends, though, with the brief but fluffily chugged strum, chiming guitar and jubilant violin of Sweet Time, striking a closing upbeat note of resilience with “I don’t/Know where this will go/But I will follow.” The original Annie Oakley never missed her target. This is a bullseye too.