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She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke

The Dutchess and the Duke
Hardly Art Records

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The Dutchess and the Duke - She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke The indie rock world is full of so many characters. There's all those desperately lonely bedroom recording dudes, those impossibly chic and urbane art-rock types and those totally cuckoo-bananas smelly indie singer/songwriters. Let's not forget the clever college-rock sophisticates, the folky neo-hippies, the mad-scientist electro-rockers and the obsessed purists of all genres.

So where do The Dutchess and the Duke fit in among that crowd? Nowhere, and that's exactly what makes the duo's debut album, She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke so great. The Dutchess (Kim Morrison) and the Duke (Jesse Lortz) aren't selling us the idea of a mad indie-rock persona and a super-cool, unsustainable lifestyle we can never hope to achieve and all the boundary-pushing music that goes with it. They're just making music as normal people. Isn't that revolutionary?

It isn't just revolutionary. It's entrancing. Mixing up pop melodies and watertight boy/girl harmonies with a loose sense of back-porch folk, She's the Dutchess comes off as music you might hear your musical neighbors making on their back porch when they think nobody's listening. It's loose, it's easy and it's about as salt-of-the-earth as you can get without foolishly invoking the songbook of someone like Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez or Billy Bragg. It's about the joy of reducing music to its simplest terms -- a tune, a couple guitars and a pair of voices, mostly -- and not just making due, but making the most of them. Who needs a fancy-schmancy studio set up in an abandoned church or a seven-piece lineup when the duo does it this well?

A lot of The Dutchess and the Duke's easygoing success stems from the duo's ability to weave its voices together with seemingly effortless ease. Lortz usually handles lead vocals with Morrison ready to step in and sweeten the deal with backing vocals and two-part harmonies far richer than most anything you've heard this year. Think of half The Mamas and the Papas reuniting to scratch an indie-folk itch and you're about right.

Lortz is primarily a dismally depression-obsessed songwriter, but the pair sneaks enough sunshine past the dark clouds to keep She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke from getting too gloomy. "Out of Time" and "Strangers" feature an almost Merseybeat command of melody, with the duo alluding to everything from The Animals to The Small Faces in its rough-and-ready melodies. The brutally depressed "Just a Ghost" might have been the darkest track to come out of the Pacific Northwest since Elliott Smith offed himself, were it not for the soulfully uplifting vocal treatment given to it. "The Prisoner" features a sitar-like lead guitar figure that has more than a little "Paint It Black" in its bones, though Lortz and Morrison's back-and-forth lead vocals and harmonies is more than enough to distract us from the Stones pot-shots. No matter where your needle or laser lands on She's the Dutchess, expect to get a firm reminder that back-to-basics songwriting and music made by normal folks hasn't been pushed out of existence by indie rock's cast of over-the-top characters and overly intricate songwriting.

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posted by on Jul 06, 2008

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She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke

The Dutchess and the Duke Hardly Art Records

The Dutchess and the Duke
Hardly Art Records