Dallas Observer review

This time around, the instruments come and go in the background until the cello and guitar and organ have become a single, stringent sound — this is the stuff of deep fuzz, roots gone psychedelic like a reverie half-remembered or a wish half-fulfilled. Edith Frost — among the rare women to shake, rattle, and roll around with the noodling indie boys in that Guysville (sic) known as Chicago — has come a long way indeed since her earliest recordings, back when she was content to play cowgirl dress-up and sing campfire songs tucked away safe and quiet in her bedroom.

Way back in 1997, when she released her first full-lengther, Calling Over Time, Frost sang her glad-to-be-sad blues like a good little indie-rocker too polite to turn it up but too honest to play it down. "I don’t want to be too happy," she sang, insisting she needed only enough happiness to tide her over… till when, though, she didn’t exactly say. But the little ol’ cowgirl from Texas (San Antonio, to be exact, with a brief college layover in Austin) has grown up, shaken off the hometown dust that got her good ink in the prematurely yellowed pages of No Depression, and moved forward toward indie pop-pop-POP: On hre relatively new Telescopic, Frost fills in the silences until the album’s drenched in bitterness, misery, despair… and, yes, just enough smile-through-the-tears hope to make it all seem so worthwhile.

Frost is no more "country" than Wilco (especially the band found on the forthcoming Summer Teeth, a majestic wet kiss that recalls the Lovin’ Spoonful and Beach Boys) or her tourmates Lullaby for the Working Class, whose two marvelous discs let it bleed like acoustic Mick and Keef. She’s more like pre-Exile Liz Phair in all her demo-darling glory, before she signed to Capitol and it became all about the production. Like Phair, Frost possesses one of those flat, pretty voices that leaves no room in which to hide anything: She sings it like she means it, plays it like she just learned it, then leaves it laying there like she just found it and didn’t want any part of it.

Telescopic is a deceptively pretty record, one of those things you pop into the CD player and let play and play until you realize the singer’s breaking hearts and ashtrays all over the house. This record’s all about love and where you can stick it. Frost — you’d think her name’s some kind of sick joke the way she writes, about how "you’ll be lonely by yourself," how she misses "your fire," how "it hurts to stare at your picture and think of how it could have been." But the woman only wishes she were cold; the sad part is, she’s willing to give all her love away, if only she could find someone to take it from her. The way Frost sings the title song, dragging out every word until the syllables become vowels become groans, you wonder if there’s enough love in the world to make her happy… even for a little while.