Review: Laura Benitez & the Heartache bare life ‘With All Its Thorns’

When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, she wore white not as a token of her purity but because she loved the color. It was a simple gesture but one which sparked a trend spanning centuries. A white wedding dress signifies commitment, adoration and virtue ⎯⎯ attributes which are stripped and varnished in the very capable hands of Laura Benitez & the Heartache, who rearrange the solemn symbol of piety into a staggering and boozy revenge fantasy. “In Red,” aching with pedal steel from Ian Sutton, electric and acoustic guitar from Bob Spector and chilling drums from Steve Pearson, cuts into the skin, as Benitez recounts the day she (stepping in as narrator) kills her husband. It’s as if Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” and Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” met for one final sacrifice, swampy and cloaked in mystique. Playing on red stains on a white dress ⎯⎯ from wine in the first verse to his oozing blood in the last ⎯⎯ Benitez stitches together one gruesome story-song, which serves as a prominent fixture of the band’s third studio album, With All Its Thorns.

Drenched in autobiographical-framed narratives, often embellishments of far simpler, grounded threads, the self-produced record is unconcerned with genre, often borrowing flavors from Benitez’s rockabilly, bluegrass, Cajun and Mexican roots. “After all those electric nights / All that love and all of those dragged out fights / All that fire and all that ice, all those tears and how hard I tried,” she warbles with “Something Better Than a Broken Heart,” a low-swinging, saucy number reflecting upon our deep-seated need for something more out of a relationship. Billy Wilson plays expert accordion, elevating the song as an exquisite tone-setter and inviting the listener through an emotional rainstorm. Later, Wilson appears on other such rich musical-hybrid centerpieces as “Almost the Right One (Casi Mi Cielo)” and “Secrets,” the latter which unearths well-kept betrayal with breezy winks and flourishes.

“Ghost Ship,” another crucial piece to her story, pays tribute to the 36 lives lost during an Oakland, Calif. club fire. “I have played underground shows and attended underground performances many times, and I felt it could have easily been me, could have easily have been any one of us,” Benitez explains of the song, which carries torrential weight of each of those lives lost, a cross Benitez takes up valiantly. She fuses that profound sorrow into her vocal performance, stretched and snapped with spooky plucking on fiddle (Steve Kallai) and upright bass (Mike Anderson). “Life will never be the same,” she mourns. It’s a fragile but compelling performance, timeless in nature.

“I’m a woman of mixed race in a world that wants you to be one thing or another, working in an industry that’s still very much a boy’s club, and I’m also a West Coast city dweller singing roots music,” she says. The commitment to her craft is well represented on all 11 songs, all featuring throbbing, heart-sore strumming of her acoustic 1996 Epiphone Excelente, which was gifted to her by an ex-husband. Funny how heartbreak always comes back around in subtle but obtrusive ways. Benitez rolls smoothly from life’s complexity of “Easier Things to Do” (“There might have been easier things to do than hold you, but I do,” she grapples with the tough stuff) to swelling, alcohol-induced desire with “Whiskey Makes Me Love You,” swiftly mixing an apathetic inspection on addiction and what love really means.

“Why Does It Matter” trembles softly, a dignified, but cumbersome, oath to remain loyal to man who may not even love her anymore ⎯⎯ “It doesn’t matter how much you would take with you, if you walked away,” she confirms, Jim Goodkind’s baritone floating in the undercurrent. On “Nora Went Down the Mountain,” Benitez closes out the record as a woman whose mysterious disappearance is one of folklore. One woman’s steel-wool courage to live unconstrained by tradition or another man’s pretense is empowering. “Someone heard she went to New York City / Someone said that she’d been seen in Paris, France,” she riddles amidst a flurry of fiddle. “The only thing that anyone could ever say for sure is Nora went down the mountain and she never came back.” It’s that kind of raw nerve that cements Benitez and company as among today’s most powerful and striking band of players and storytellers.

With All Its Thorns is at times vulnerable and affecting, other times vigorous and unrelenting, and still elsewhere, a glorious display of homespun real life tales of life, love and loss.

Grade: 4.5 out of 5

Photo Credit: Emily Sevin

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