There are few female acts in the country music space as committed to refurbishing her scratchy record collection, Willow Avalon. Tradition, as she told us on her debut LP Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell, runs in the blood with her family. Most notably passed down from her father, Jim White, who helped pioneer traditional country and dig deep into its ties to the deep south. If her first studio effort didn’t make it clear, then Pink Pocket Pistol goes to confirm that Willow Avalon isn’t all that interested in changing up the aesthetics of where the genre was when her dad was in charge.
In most cases, she doesn’t really need to. The singer’s glowing whisper cuts deep when given some razor-sharp one-liners to fire off, evoking that stereo crackle that her influences fired off shots through. “He’s writhing, crying like a baby,” she beams on the record’s title track, pointing the barrel of her piece in the face of her next victim. She’s in a much darker place this go-around, but the thematic extremes feel like basic instinct for her.
A few tracks down, and Avalon is telling another lover that “the good Lord is gonna strike you with lightning” on “Work To Do,” with a shrill twinkle to her already haunting voice, delivering the message like a bloodlust lullaby. The singer is much more vengeful this time around, swimming in puddles of blood in between key changes. She gets employed to help clean some of it up when fellow femme fatale Kaitlin Butts calls her up on “Hypothetically Speaking,” when Butts’ in-character husband meets his end by way of some runny eggs in the frying pan. The dark side of Willow Avalon does seem to still have her funny bone intact, even if the laughs it conjures up may be a bit nervous.
That hesitation seems to be the main thing holding Avalon back on what’s otherwise a statement of a sophomore project. Where the weepy steels and whispery altos can glide us along into some pretty imaginative places, the main current of the record is definitely pretty slow-moving. There’s not a whole lot of variety in between numbers, tempos rarely push or pull in any direction that could be deemed too challenging. While she does ebb and flow between victim on a track like “God Help The Next One” and culprit during “Cardinal Sin,” there’s never really any big signals to discern between the two. The singer’s consistency, while normally a strength, makes big moments of development fall a little flat.
As assured as Willow Avalon is in her now signature sound, she’s never too keen to test the waters or try to push those limits even just an inch. When she chooses to close the record on a hopeful note with “Georgia Mile,” it’s hard again for heartthrobs and heartaches to differentiate themselves through her delivery.
The sound she’s going for may be evergreen, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mood should be. From achy ballads to chamber-spinning murder tunes, Avalon has a knack for picking and writing songs that are ripe with the lifeblood of country music. The only issue is that she struggles to clearly separate themes. Pink Pocket Pistol had all the options to be bigger than its novelty factor, but it never crosses that threshold, playing it safe instead.
