Tender Fruit

If we fall in love, what will we sing about, if we’re not unhappy with ourselves?” Posed on the first track of Christy Smith’s first album as the Tender Fruit, that question is not quite as rhetorical as it might first sound; good songs are often the happy byproduct of unhappy relationships.

Smith, indeed, suffered for her art: Flotsam & Krill chronicles a particularly painful break-up, documenting vertiginous ups and downs with admirably tough-hearted resolve. The guy in that relationship made his own break-up album, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, but Smith is no mere footnote to another musician’s career. For one thing, she has long been active in the North Carolina scene, fronting Nola and appearing on both For Emma and Megafaun’s Gather Form & Fly. More crucially, however, Flotsam & Krill, which Smith self-released in 2010, reveals a woman with a distinct musical personality and an idiosyncratic approach to rustic foothills Americana.

Smith recorded the album piecemeal at home over four years, with Vernon co-producing three tracks and, later, Megafaun’s Phil Cook helming seven. Despite its patchwork origins, the album plays as a cohesive statement about romantic dissolution and truck repairs. Smith covers a wider range of sounds and styles, as doom-laden chants jostle against bright pop choruses, high-lonesome country vocals, and starker, sweeter folk ruminations. There’s a strong handmade sensibility to the music, as though Smith crafted each song from whatever materials were lying around. Rather than self-absorbed or confessional, Flotsam & Krill sounds less like therapy than a painful, soulful exorcism that portends great things from this unique talent. —Stephen Deusner