Mars Arizona
Hello, Cruel World
(Big Barn, 2008)

Mars Arizona is Nicole Storto and Paul Knowles, San Francisco Bay Area singer/songwriters with a firm knowledge of American roots music styles, particularly the kind of old-time, bleary-eyed, pain-in-the-heart country music that never goes out of style with lovers, losers, and boozers. Hello, Cruel World is even more country than 2005’s All Over the Road, with arrangements that combine comfortable down home acoustic picking with a bit of Knowles’s metallic guitar crunch. Knowles and Storto compliment each other vocally like the best country duos; he’s all hard edges and ornery attitude while she’s more pliant and resigned to life’s hard knocks.

“Dirty Town”, a Knowles/Storto collaboration, opens the album with a jaunty arrangement that combines the swing of Texas and Paris with a cynical lyric about conniving preachers and lost, homeless women. Special guest David Grisman contributes a jazzy mandolin solo while local fiddler Alisa Rose expertly weaves her countrypolitan fills in and out of the mix. Storto’s “Earth” is a stately ode to our planet, implicitly lamenting the global disaster we seem to be headed for. Knowles plays understated Gospel piano and bluesy electric guitar, while Storto turns in a hopeless, bemused vocal.

Storto’s “Good to be Lucky” is another vision of doom, delivered with a vocal full of gentle irony. Knowles’ stinging slide guitar and Al Perkins’s (Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band) solemn pedal steel fills add to the tune’s desolate aura. Knowles’s “Landscape (for NOLA)” sustains the troubled mood with a song that likens national disaster with the personal pain of lost love. Knowles sings with the broken voice of a desperate lover while Perkins’s pedal steel compliments the song’s bleak lyrics. “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” is so full of depression and desperation that it’s actually funny. Storto and Knowles sound smug and gleeful as they toss their warnings about looming death and ecological failure into the dirty air.

On every album the duo always fills out the program with a few unexpected covers and this time is no exception. They take “By the Light of a Magical Moon”, a T. Rex tune from Bolan’s hippie dippy days, and turn it into a bouncy country two-step marked by some subtle, wailing pedal steel work by Perkins and a bluegrassy lead guitar solo by Andon Davis. Storto’s vocal on “Blue Kentucky Girl” is pure heartache with an understated pain that makes sad country songs so transcendental; Perkins adds some blue, rippling dobro fills while Rose’s fiddle and Davis’s mandolin dance despondently in the background. “In the Pines” gets a bare bones treatment, just Knowles on guitar supporting the duo’s harmonies, wordless whoops that sound both wretched and jubilant.

The collection lives up to its ironic title with songs that illuminate the personal and national disasters that seem to be plaguing us at the dawn of a new century. By combining grim insight, sardonic humor, and a bit of uplifting music, Mars Arizona gives us something to smile at while the smoggy sun sets on what’s left of the American West.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]