Sometimes you’ll get an artist that’ll fill an album with blues standards, stuff like “St. James Infirmary” and “John The Revelator,” and, you know, they might play these songs well (and they are good songs), but it’s more than likely that that album is destined to be periodically displayed in coffee-shop stands. And even that practice is being phased out.
By any rate, that’s essentially the kind of album that Madeline Peyroux gives us with Secular Hymns, the exception being that these aren’t standards. Also, they blur the line between jazz and blues, which might sound interesting, except that it’s already been done and it’s called swing.
This isn’t swing. If anything, it’s boring.
But it didn’t have to be. Songs like “More Time,” which honestly have more in common with R&B in the vein of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” than they do with jazz or blues, are upbeat, crisp, and sublimely funky in a subdued kind of way. They are also, unfortunately, vastly outnumbered by the rest of the material on the record.
If you’re going to sing religious music in an unreligious context, do what Nina Simone did, take that hymn (strip it of its religiosity if you want), but add something. Add pain, add anger. Otherwise you get a record essentially destined to be played softly in the background of a coffee shop in an attempt not to offend anyone, noncommittal in nature — kind of like a double-double.
