Maggie and Terre Roche,
"Seductive Reasoning"
(Columbia, 1975)

By DWIGHT GARNER There's something about The Roches that's always tended to provoke extreme reactions. People either love their swooping three-part harmonies and folksy-neurotic humor, or they want to flee to another time zone. Put me firmly in the former camp -- at least when it comes to their lush and fabulously quirky early studio albums, "The Roches" (1979) and "Keep on Doing" (1982). To my mind, though, the Roches' finest album is perhaps their least known -- a rarely-seen 1975 recording by Maggie and Terre Roche (sister Suzzy joined a few years later) titled "Seductive Reasoning." Earthier and more unfettered than anything the trio has done since, "Seductive Reasoning" (which was re-released in 1981 with a new album cover, shown here) is not only among the most underrated folk-rock albums of the 1970's, it's a minor classic. This is the album that got me through college. Maggie and Terre Roche weren't much older than me when they recorded it, and the songs -- which are littered with comic and poignant references to drugs, telephone bills, interracial romance, landlords, contraceptive pills -- express a level of political and moral confusion that's often missing from their later work. They're the songs the smart/pensive narrators of some of Jayne Anne Phillips's early short stories, and her novel "Machine Dreams," would have written if they could. The songs on "Seductive Reasoning" run the gamut from stark ballads ("West Virginia," about a suicide, is so quiet you can hear the piano's pedals working) to fast and funny rave-ups such as "If You Emptied Out All of Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change," which was produced by Paul Simon and features both the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and the Oak Ridge Boys. Most of the songs strike someplace in the middle, however, with Maggie's wryly subversive lyrics steering the duo clear of sentimental overload. On the lovely ballad "Down the Dream," about a white woman who's running away from her life to hitchhike with her black lover, the singer reminds herself that "there are some things to fall back on, like a knife, or a career." And in "Underneath the Moon," Maggie's and Terre's voices combine for the following observation: "Good men want a virgin, so don't give yourself too soon/ Except in an emergency, like underneath the moon." "Seductive Reasoning" brims with these kind of moments; its title, in fact, says it all.

Download a clip (1.1MB) of "Down the Dream"
from "Seductive Reasoning"

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