Self-assured Staves offer defiant, diverse ‘Good Woman’

While I wasn’t under the impression of listening to a whole new artist with the Staves’ latest album, “Good Woman” – these are, after all, the same three sisters who have been masterfully interweaving their voices since childhood – they certainly seem to be redefining what form their harmonies and melodies take.

Perhaps because of my tendency to admire vocal talent over that which shuffles behind it, the British indie-folk trio has always been marked in my mind as epitomizing vocally oriented folk music. Their ability to instrumentalize their singing, make themselves both the base and front feature of tracks, has always been remarkable.

The first sound of “Good Woman” manipulates that concept; it is a synthesized version of their voices, which steps discretely between notes, an open declaration from the group that the word “instrumentalize” has been taken one step further than on the previous album “If I Was.”

Yet as the album goes on, the opening track’s role as a thesis comes into question. That intention of pushing their sonic boundaries seems to be fading throughout the album like my New Year’s resolutions through January. For a moment, I’m convinced that we are backpedaling toward the Staves’ history in the same way I still feel like it’s 2020.

But I guess that analogy is better than I intended because it’s not 2020, and I’m still working on those resolutions; it’s 2021, and things are markedly different. Where some part of me felt the experimentation of Tracks 1 through 3 fading, I was actually just become accustomed to it. That is to say, my initial skepticism was ill-founded; this album does a lot to push the boundaries of the Staves’ sound.

In truth, the more obvious shifts in sound come early in the album and desensitize one to what follows. In particular, “Careful, Kid” has a grinding, abrasive opening, which gives way to loud synths and stuttering drums. The track is one of the album’s best moments, a song bubbling with sonic rage, a little condescension and a lot of character.

Maybe defiance is a better word than rage, as that seems to be a theme of the album’s lyrics: from “Devotion,” “Don’t you deal me no favors / Don’t you sell me no lie.” That defiance is contextualized by the album title and the opening track, which call clearly on what the Staves are concerned with: womanhood.

Tackling that concern from the get-go, the song “Good Woman” seems at first to be self-assuring, the repetition of “I’m a good woman” perhaps undermining its confidence. But in time, the opposite is true; it’s an assured remark, an insistence. What the repetition does is to call into question what that statement means, which leads beautifully into the content of the album.

It’d be a mistake to take the whole album as assured and without its insecurities and moments of openness. Softer-spoken “Paralysed” touches on the narrator’s stasis, building slowly around an equally static and problematic man and a series of “I knows,” knowledge which seems to create the paralysis. The album’s tones and subjects, then, are diverse and interesting.

By no means a major reinvention, “Good Woman” feels like the Staves stretching their legs a little bit, summiting a few hills that they’ve been skirting the bases of for some time now. And they do it in good form, both surprising and lulling the listener into their exploration of what it means to be a “Good Woman.”

The final track, “Waiting on Me to Change,” seems almost addressed to my observations, as they echo “I’ll change, I’ll change, I’ll change / when I want to.” “Good Woman” is ample proof that the Staves can change if they choose.

But do I want the Staves to, and do they? On “Good Woman,” they’re resoundingly themselves, and it is such a comfort, as always, to spend time with them coming out of my speakers. We can only look forward to what’s to come from the three sisters.

Julien A. Luebbers can be reached at julien.leubbers@gmail.com.