There is no more delicious experience as a music critic than being accused of sexism. It's a delight to hear via e-mail how your opinion on one particular album by one particular artist can be extrapolated to a worldview that favors the marginalization and stereotyping of an entire gender. This despite all my best efforts to avoid the common pitfalls of a community that continues to be dominated by male voices: no sexualized descriptors like "chanteuse" or condescending adjectives like "cute," no allegations that there is a male Svengali behind the curtain, no commentary on how attractive (or un-) I find the artist in question.

Yet all the same, I still feel pangs of guilt when I look at my music library and see the men outnumbering the women by a healthy margin. It's better than it once was, and two of my last three year-end favorites were bands with female singers, but the disparity remains undeniable, an easily interpretable manifestation of my personal taste. It doesn't help matters that recent indie rock trending, particularly the rise of coffee-shop folk, has pushed a lot of female artists in a rather dreary direction; in other words, there are a lot more Cat Powers these days than Sleater-Kinneys.

Not that there's anything wrong with Chan Marshall, though her sparse and moody sound can very easily become too slick or too dilute in the wrong hands. Shannon Wright lives dangerously on this border throughout Let in the Light, sticking close to the usual guitar and piano-centric formulas and singing in a distinct but familiar low, raspy alto. The production skews twilight, the arrangements tend to be solo, and her lyrics bend towards the poetic and the metaphorical, with a couple maybe/maybe-not Dylan references thrown in for good measure. All par for the singer-songwriter course.

Wright also drifts back and forth on the casual vs. formal axis, some tracks ("Defy This Love", "Steadfast and True") built on recital-proper piano parts, while others ("When the Light Shone Down", "In the Morning") shamble along at a sleepy pace and leave the edges rough. The fancier piano numbers are more unique, but also more restrictive: Wright composes pretty instrumental melodies with a classical flourish one rarely hears from a rock artist on ivory keys, but their complexity leaves little space for her voice to navigate, even in solo arrangements. With the guitar, the opposite tends to be true, as Wright's deliberate and mellow style calls out for some caffeine and mimes Girlysound-era Liz Phair a bit too closely.

The coffee theory is borne out by the more strident tracks, which tend to be album highlights, especially in contrast to the majority melancholy. "St. Pete" is built on Wright's most jagged guitar part, and requires her to go beyond her currently-preferred whisper to a slightly snotty bellow more in line with her earlier full-band sound. That welcome snarl comes back on the choruses of "Don't You Doubt Me", where an unleashed drummer and two off-kilter guitars lend the tune a discomforting urgency, and the album-closing "Everybody's Got Their Own Part to Play", a triumphant piano-rock epic with an acidic underbelly.

These flashes of menace amidst the hazier surroundings make me wish they were more frequent, that Wright still favored the toothier approach of her previous records. It's these harsher moments that separate her from the indie female singer-songwriter pack, a clique that seems increasingly drawn into the dreary hypnosis of heavy atmosphere and somnambulant tempo. Ah, but perhaps I shouldn't generalize.

-Rob Mitchum, June 01, 2007