Somewhere Gone

Photographer: Ali Smith.
Ex-X woman Exene Cervenka returned to acoustic music with 2009's SOMEWHERE GONE, an album that fuses spare folk melodies that suggest she's been listening to the Harry Smith anthology with bittersweet country accents that somehow make Cervenka's lyrics cut even deeper. The socio-political insights that dominated much of Cervenka's music of the '90s and the new millennium are less obvious on SOMEWHERE GONE, but as a lyricist Cervenka remains a keen observer of the human condition, and her beat-influenced lyrics reveal an intense honesty and emotional force in her sometimes abstract wordplay. SOMEWHERE GONE is a different animal from Cervenka's acoustic music of the late '80s and early '90s, at once simpler, riskier, and more confident, and it captures one of the great wild talents of her generation in strong and impressive form, still unafraid to take her talent in new directions after more than a quarter-century of blazing trails.