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SEPTEMBER 4 2009

Lucy Michelle - The Color Salmon.
Special Party Time For Everybody.
Last July, Lucy Michelle and The Velvet Lapelles released their debut Orange Peels and Rattlesnakes at a packed Bedlam Theatre. For those in attendance, it was an epiphany; a glimpse into the future of a band on the verge. Now, after a year of critical acclaim, touring, and sheer determination, The Velvet Lapelles have released Special Party Time For Everybody, the finest folk record to come out of the Twin Cities since Mason Jennings' Birds Flying Away.

The Color Salmon is a relatively plain song: short, sweet, and featuring only Lucy, her ukulele, and a guitar. The themes are fairly common, and the song itself bears little embellishment, eschewing the band's otherwise complex arrangements to focus instead on Lucy's singing voice, which on Party Time sounds all the more beautiful for its imperfections—more Dylan than Holiday, to cite two recent comparisons—and at shows seems stronger with each performance.

Around the halfway mark, she sings "Like the movement of the tide, everything that's inside rolls away, rolls away, rolls away." The lyrics are fine, but it's the delivery—which has this smooth, lulling, Nick Drake-like quality—that just slays me every time. There are a hundred other similar moments on the album, which came out last week. Buy it.

Todd Pitman