I believe storytelling to be the most complicated art form. More than mere style, a story needs substance, movement, structure, and personality. It needs characters guided by motivations and challenged by obstacles, and every moment spent on a story must help it progress, must contribute to the development of either character or plot. It is extraordinarily difficult to tell a cohesive story when you have 120 minutes to work within, nevermind less than five. You mustn’t waste a single word when you’re a slave to a runtime. Kathleen Edwards’s debut album, Failer, may serve as an example of concise story-telling done right. At just over 40 minutes, Edwards makes her words count. Failer falls somewhere between the intimate lyricism of Tori Amos and the imaginative characters of Neko Case. For instance, in Six O’Clock News, the protagonist laments her lover’s suicide-by-cop. Westby accounts an affair between an aging addict and a runaway teen. In three to five minutes, Edwards tells stories rich in character drama. Each protagonist has a dense history, depicted or implied. Edwards’s women are flawed, but by no means broken.

Edwards’s talent for penmanship is matched equally by her ear for melody. Her songs are simple, but sweet. Often sad, but without asking the listener to feel sorry for them. The ashy, transparent sound of her voice brings Lucinda Williams to mind, but Edwards is able to capture her spirit without outright stealing it. It’s her voice that allows Edwards to lean heavily on her country influences, to write about broken hearts and insobriety without sounding clichéd. Indeed, Edwards manages to avoid many of the trappings of mainstream country music without pretending they don’t exist. Failer is not an alt-country album the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is (that is, barely recognizable as such). Weeping slide-guitars and the plucky twang of strings are tastefully balanced by elements that are atypically country, like the sneering saxophone on 12 Bellevue, or the delicate non-lexical vocables of The Lone Wolf. Popular country music is in this album’s blood, in its genetics, but it flirts with blues and alternative rock as if it were a character in one of Edwards’s songs whose parents wouldn’t approve. Altogether, Failer is a lovely collection of songs, of stories, told in the sweet-but-seasoned voice of a woman with wisdom beyond her years.