There isn’t a bold-lined boundary between the musician who rips all her ideas from the pages of a bygone style and the musician who writes new chapters to continue a style whose book was neither concluded nor closed.
Yet Cara Beth Satalino, the estimable Outer Spaces frontwoman, feels and sounds as if she’s on the more creative side of the dotted line on her band’s debut long-player A Shedding Snake, in part because her starting point—1980s college rock—was in its time more influential than popular.
Back then, the most-heard college rock band was R.E.M., and Satalino used to be in the band Witches while she lived in Athens, Ga., R.E.M.’s hometown, but she’s in Baltimore now and she has no vocal resemblance to Michael Stipe.
Instead, Satalino sings with straightforward prettiness that never relies too much on girlishness, and with a curl that very faintly echoes country music’s scorned women from Patsy Cline up to Miranda Lambert.
The instrumental echoes are less faint: Guitar figures jangle as crisply as amplified zils on a tambourine, drums almost perfectly balance treble and bass elements, flourishes stay minimal and expand only when their effect can make a difference to the emotions.
Those emotions gain intimacy from how Satalino turns potential insularity—one player in Outer Spaces, Chester Gwazda, also produces, and the other, Rob Dowler, keeps the lineup a trio—into an advantage. She expresses the gorgeously spare melancholy of “I Saw You” and the twangy showdown of “Born Enemy” as if sharing them with each listener individually.
She also gives the 13 tracks an overall sense of simplicity despite the complications of the lyrics. Despite, too, a band name like Outer Spaces, the music is intensely internal, which is one reason A Shedding Snake is more than other people’s pages.
