If Adieu False Heart comes across a little genteel, it's far from soft-headed. The singing is superb: Linda Ronstadt remains one of pop's most lucent vocalists, while Ann Savoy (who has done fine work in the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band) proves a remarkable soloist and duet partner.
There's a locked-in quality to the material, but the humid, constrained tone fits a song-cycle of heartbreak and loss. Adieu is framed by instrumental interludes on resophonic violin and bowed dulcimer, and Louisiana guitarist Sam Broussard adds his impeccable touch to a cover of Richard Thompson's "Burns' Supper".
The musicianship and the singing are beyond reproach; the pacing is less satisfying. Still, Bill Monroe's "The One I Love Is Gone" works as a sprightly updating of a piece of lovelorn pathos, and "King Of Bohemia" (another Thompson tune) moves along nicely in triple time.
Adieu illustrates how the nervous ellipses of seemingly simple music can become the music's content, but most of this is formalism that never quite breaks free. So when Savoy sings, "Oh, you speak the words/Locked in my breast," you get the sense that the words remain locked up, even though the singing is gorgeous. And on the cover of the Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee", itself a pretty genteel pop song, Savoy and Ronstadt pay lip service but nothing more to a classic bit of formalist constraint.
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