“Heels” is a tale of insomnia, told patiently; until it’s not.
Maddy Simpson and Mairead Guy of Sweet Petunia sing of lying awake all night, desperate for sleep and yet wary of recurring nightmares. In the end, “the stars, they fade. The streets start shining / Above the trees, the sun starts climbing,” and the insomniac narrator meets the new day with bleary eyes and a fragile spirit. What had been calm banjo accelerates, and Simpson and Guy howl “I think more about the cracks in my heels,” their voices straining and breaking as they repeat this fixation like a fevered mantra.
As Boston duo Sweet Petunia, Simpson and Guy have the musicianship, vocal ability and formal knowledge to play straightforward traditional music, but they have chosen a different, distinctly expressive path. Some songs on their debut album Foggy Mountain Mental Breakdown hew to familiar songwriter or bluegrass forms, sure, but others either crack at the edges with nervy punk energy (see above) or expand into shoegaze washes. At the core, Simpson and Guy are like a lot of people. They don’t feel great. On this record, they write and sing with openness and honesty.
