Audio Cassette review:
Christine Lavin - Please Don't Make Me Too Happy

Christine Lavin - Please Don't Make Me Too Happy

Band: Christine Lavin Title: Please Don't Make Me Too Happy Rating: Release Date: 21 February, 1995 Media: Audio Cassette Tracks: 1: Oh No 2: Constant State of Want 3: Psychic 4: Secrets at This Wedding 5: Sixth Floor 6: Jane 7: Jagged Hearts 8: Scatter New Seeds 9: Waiting for the 'B' Train 10: Something Is Wrong With This Picture 11: 69 12: Please Don't Make Me Too Happy 13: Oh No

Editoral Review "Oh No" resembles a Lucille Ball routine where the comedienne can't find her glasses, her purse, or her phone book. On the up side, Christine Lavin's eighth album, Please Don't Make Me Too Happy, includes three hilarious stand-up monologues thinly disguised as folksongs. "Waiting for the B Train" is a slice-of-life, absurdist narrative from the New York subway system, and the album's title track is a wonderfully exaggerated worry-fest about growing too contented to write meaningful folksongs. On the down side, the album's other nine songs are eye-glazingly earnest. On "Jane," she turns a reunion with a long-lost friend into a smug, humorless put-down of housewives everywhere. On "The Sixth Floor," a song about the Kennedy Museum in Dallas, Lavin manages to make the most controversial historical event of her lifetime deadly dull. Several numbers about the single life wallow in self-pity. And teaming up with musicians who have played with the Band, Nanci Griffith, Bryan Adams, the Max Weinberg Seven, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra doesn't flesh out Lavin's notoriously thin music so much as it exposes just how limited a singer she is. --Geoffrey Himes .. You can see a complete list of all Christine Lavin discography, or go back to the Christine Lavin tabs