Skylar Gudaz "Oleander" CD

This is a CD in a eco-wallet.

Oleander, the overdue debut LP from the sharp Durham songwriter and stunning singer Skylar Gudasz, is chockablock with talented guests. Members of the North Carolina Symphony sit alongside a who’s who of local session players and vocalistspop crooners Brett Harris and Django Haskins, band-leading veterans Brad Cook and Leah Gibson, experienced sidemen Jeff Crawford and James Wallace.

Chicago free jazz giant Ken Vandermark breaths between and beneath lines with his horn, and college-rock demigod Norman Blake, of Teenage Fanclub fame, murmurs gently behind Gudasz during “Friday Night Blues.” Chris Stamey, a North Carolina musical institution with few equals in influence, is the wonder behind the curtain here, the producer who’s been helping Gudasz orchestrate these dozen songs for years.

But when these largely perfect forty-seven minutes click to an end following the exquisite drift of “Car Song,” only one inviolable star remains as it should be, Skylar Gudasz. These songs deftly explore adoration and abandonment, lust and loneliness, friendship and fallibility. Gudasz loads them with punchy quips (“Don’t ask me if I believe in God/I believe in Gibson guitars) and ponderous gems (“I’m not saying I want to be there with you always/’cause honey you know there ain’t no such thing.”) And she sings all of these lines with a practiced vocal perspicacity, hitting every word so as to make it the most effective. Nothing seems arbitrary.

- Indy Week