Underdog

The sixth album by folk-pop duo Wishing Chair starts with "One Real Song," a fairly ghastly iteration of that always irritating subgenre of pop songs about how difficult the life of a touring musician is, this time shot through with cranky lines about the commercial marketplace. It's an unseemly bit of whining, but once singer/songwriter Kiya Heartwood gets that out of her system, much of the rest of Underdog is quite entertaining. The trad-style ballad "Sue Mundy" has a strong Fairport Convention vibe, and "Outlaw Wedding" is a convincing piece of hard-edged folk-rock. The lyrics of the latter song seem a bit unnecessarily defensive, however: the song is about gay marriage in general and the recent wedding of Heartwood and her Wishing Chair partner Miriam Davison in particular, yet it seems that anyone likely to listen to a Wishing Chair album in the first place probably has nothing against gay marriage, which makes the repeated references to "you" and "your" opposition sound unnecessarily strident. However, occasional lapses into finger-pointing are the bane of any political folk songwriter, and Heartwood only very rarely falls into that trap. The sound of the album is a bit fuller than many of the duo's previous efforts, with a number of guest musicians adding pop and country-flavored instrumentation to the duo's acoustic string settings.