Calling Over Time

In some quarters, the music contained on Edith Frost’s 1997 debut album, Calling Over Time, is considered country music, while Frost herself admits “I sing the blues most every night.” With noted members of the Chicago indie-rock scene (Gastr del Sol, Eleventh Dream Day, High Llamas), Frost offers a sparse and endearing collection of tunes that sound like soulmates to Cat Power, Smog’s Bill Callahan and Will Oldham (whose music inspired Frost to send her tapes to his record label). The piano and a simply strummed acoustic guitar sit at the album’s center and provide the perfect counterpoint to Frost’s solemn vocals and the deliberately flat, dark production. The galloping “Too Happy” is hardly that. “Pony Song,” “Temporary Loan” and the reluctant renewal of “Wash of Water” beautifully update the invasion of privacy delivered by confessional singer-songwriters in the early ‘70s. The title track with its haunting elliptical plea “Loving hand turns burning sand to water,” the jet-lagged swagger and promise of rebirth of “Albany Blues” and the childlike strum of “Give Up Your Love” provide an album’s worth of riches.