It sounds like it’s heading down a sassy bluegrass route when it starts out, but the quickly appearing pedal steel of band member Alex Formento shows that The Talking Hearts are heading into some kind of hybrid country. The sass is still there, though, in the lyrics, analytically taking apart a short-lived beau of whom Rachel Rosenberg sings “fooled me once, can’t fool me twice, so I won’t shed a tear / Going anywhere but here / I thought I knew you (found out you live a lie) / You drove me crazy, but you didn’t make me cry.” It’s that style of clinical takedown that appears across their new album Memory Lane (with song titles such as How Much Trouble?, Learning To Lose You, and Fake Friend For Real), which is responsible for the band being cited as representing the quite small subgenre of “psychoanalytic country“. That it also shares a jauntiness reminiscent of Earle’s Galway Girl is not a problem at all.
Memory Lane is the band’s second album, and The Talking Hearts are fiddle player Rachel Rosenberg, Zach Meyer on mandolin, Sophie Wellington on guitar and second fiddle, Alex Formento on pedal steel and Telecaster, with Dan Bui on upright bass and drummer Mike Harmon.
