A Glimmer of Greatness

By RICHARD CORLISS

One good gauge of your love for a new CD is how long it takes you to get from first cut to last. By that standard, and from this angle, Kim Richey's third album, Glimmer, is a winner: we kept pushing the replay button on so many songs that it was only the prod of journalistic responsibility that got us to the end of the album in time to write about it. This is a country voice--as singer and songwriter--worth spending time with; a mind worth creeping into and curling up in for an extended stay.

The voice--subtly assertive, and less country twang than cool jazzy pop--hints that, at 42, the tall blond from Ohio has knocked around long enough to have seen and learned a few things. For example: the precarious balance, in matters of love, between whining and wisdom. The people in Richey's songs, as in so much country music, are in rehab from life--nursing themselves out of a heart hurt or taking a baby step back into the big bad world.

"How have I been?" she asks in Hello, Old Friend. "Well, that can of worms ain't worth openin'/ Leave it at 'fine.'" But her songs (all of which she wrote or co-wrote) never leave it there; they explore the conversation a smart soul has with herself when she's just said "fine" to her no-longer lover. And Richey's lyrics fill the tense, unspoken spaces with hard truths, wry rear views and a desperate lucidity.

Sometimes that self-knowledge is visible only from atop the junk heap of good intentions. "Now the deed is done, and the smoke has cleared/ From the ashes some glimmer of the truth appears," Richey sings in the lustrously plaintive Didn't I. Then, in the song's chorus, all objectivity evaporates--"I did the best I could/ Didn't I? Didn't I? Didn't I?"--and by repeating the question, she makes it both an accusation and a child's plea. The song is a jeweled showcase for a shattered psyche.

A bereft lover can be playfully vindictive, as in the up-tempo (You Remember) The Way It Never Was, where even the girl-group la-la-las in the background have the whiplash of a taunt in them. Or she can try to take the long view. In So It Goes a woman hears about the end of an affair in whispers; the news has the impact of a sudden death in the family. Yet, she tells herself, "The spring lies waiting beneath the frozen ground/ And I'll be seein' you around/ So it goes."

In Gravity mournful strings underscore the observation that a high-flying fling can be brought to earth by "the weight of circumstance"--by capricious gravity.

The whole set has a nice mix of gravity--heft, seriousness--and buoyancy. It's the declaration of a survivor who sings what's important to her without sweating the consequences. As she sings in Can't Lose Them All, "I could go down in history, or I could go up in smoke/ Be the center of attention or the butt of every joke." Glimmer should put Richey at the center of attention. And if she makes more albums like this one, she could make a little music history.

--By Richard Corliss