These Chicks Can Fly

By RICHARD CORLISS

Their overnight success took many moons. For nearly a decade the Dixie Chicks played grange halls and coffeehouses, appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and in a McDonald's commercial, toured from their native Texas to Alaska, without corralling the interest of a Nashville record company. The band's bluegrass-meets-cowgirl sound (its first CD, in 1991, was titled Thank Heavens for Dale Evans) seemed way too outre for the country-music establishment, and girl groups had never made much of a noise in Twangtown. It wasn't till Sony Nashville highlighted the Dixie Chicks' blond sauciness that the group became the thing du jour, peddling 6 million copies of its first big album, Wide Open Spaces, and earning a slew of music awards--including three Grammys this year, one for Best New Artist.

A quick listen to the album proved that however retro the group's moniker (taken from the Little Feat song Dixie Chicken) and spangled its couture (was it from Frederick's of Dollywood?), this was no three-headed blond joke. Lead singer Natalie Maines had won a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music. Emily Erwin (now Robison) could play a banjo as if it were a mojo, and her sister Martie Seidel is a classical violinist turned fiddler. These weren't the Lone Star Spice Girls; they were damn fine musicians. But the CD was on the perky-ordinary side; Natalie's voice had more attitude than authority. One wondered whether the Chicks could find a vision to match their virtuosity.

Wonder no more. Fly, their new set, is a big leap forward, ornery and urgent. It has strong song selection, including five co-written by the Chicks, and a wide range of musical moods; the trio is at home in Appalachian mountain music or trailer-park rock 'n' roll. They can switch instantly from sexual threat ("You can't take back every chill you give me/ You're going down with me, baby, heart and all") in If I Fall You're Going Down with Me to rural yearning ("I wanna touch the earth/ I wanna break it in my hands/ I wanna grow something wild and unruly") in Cowboy Take Me Away.

Any good country-girl CD needs some salutary male bashing. The Chicks try it figuratively, in the rockabilly taunt "I need a boy like you like a hole in my head/ Let's just say we will and then don't instead." The bashing is literal in Goodbye Earl, a story song about an abused wife who feeds her evil spouse poisoned black-eyed peas, then dumps his body in the lake. ("The Dixie Chicks do not advocate premeditated murder," a liner note reads, "but love getting even.") The album's basic motif, though, isn't revenge; it's independence. These songs are smart about the ways a girl tries to become a woman.

What lingers longer and deeper than the tunes is the wily musicianship. Sin Wagon offers the bluest grass on the album, with Seidel's hot fiddle, Robison's flaming banjo and Maines' attack on the lyrics ("Do a little mattress dancin'") with the violence of a born-again bad girl. The album's best cuts offer prime, primal, high-altitude country. Listeners should fly up to meet it.

--By Richard Corliss