Jenny Toomey
w/ guests
Sat Oct 20, Sit & Spin, 441-9484, $8.

It’s been nearly five years since Tsunami’s Brilliant Mistake hit the indie shelves, but singer/label owner/music activist Jenny Toomey is a busy woman nonetheless. Aside from heading up the Future of Music Coalition, a safeguard for artists’ rights, Toomey has just released Antidote, her double album divided into two cities–one disc for songs written while in Chicago, the other dedicated to time spent in Nashville.

Antidote is exactly what it claims to be. Perfectly timed and oh-so-desired, Toomey’s album is an antidote to the current plethora of male-driven records wailing about love and loss, reveling in regret, offering recollection after romanticized recollection–each and every one wholly lacking in insight. From the very first track off Antidote‘s Chicago disc, Toomey has her eye keenly trained on what went wrong and how to keep it all from happening again. Or, should the same disaster befall another relationship, Toomey can take satisfaction in the fact that she has only herself to blame. There’s something very healthy about that. Antidote is decidedly forward-feeling in a time when backward seems to be the prevailing, stagnant direction in which to find lyrical inspiration.

Chicago finds Toomey joined by former Coctail Mark Greenberg and Aluminum Group frontman John Navin, as well as Andrew Bird and Toomey’s Liquorice bandmate Dan Littleton. Horns punctuate the sparsely arranged pop songs, lending them a rainy-afternoon-at-the-café feeling. Opening with “Patsy Cline,” a tune drenched in irony and slaying the lure of the strong and silent man, Toomey reels out all types of broken-down romantics: “He had more records than words, so he played them when we’re alone instead of speaking” (“Word Traffic”); “I raised the roof before he hit the ceiling/I cleared the air before he blew it up/I couldn’t see a forest or a tree for the clear cut” (“Clear Cut”); “I’m not offering a heart you could break/just a chance you might make a graceful mistake” (“Breezewood, PA”). A graceful mistake? What a wistful line to utter in the aftermath of a missed chance.

Antidote drips with such beautiful, sigh-inducing irony. The Chicago disc finishes with “Useless Excuses,” a song so sad, its final lines are almost unbearable: “Who wouldn’t be fed up with the force fed?/I’m unsung and unsaid in this bare bed where you left excuses with me.”

If Chicago seems based in fresh, unblinking insight, Nashville sounds as if it’s steeped in lush resignation and the blue sadness that accompanies the realization that mistakes are to be made over and over again, and perhaps no one can ever fill that one nagging hole in your heart. Toomey is flanked by members of Lambchop, whose own quirky lushness lends the songs a gloomy, overcast weightiness on this collection. “Overrated over-sung/Again you overestimated someone” gives way to “His parched and sharpening eyes meant to cut glass/Never meant to cry/ And you saw that from the start but you let him get inside you” (“Unclaimed”); this is the song that opens and closes the Chicago disc–the reprise is a nice touch. The Nashville disc swaggers with sage, perhaps unincorporated knowledge. Piano lines meander through streets populated with smoky jazz joints and tenements, where gilded curtains fade and fray in the windows.

Need more enticement? “I’m retiring your jersey/You’re the last crazy fuck inside me/For all your talent and your charm/You were uniquely qualified to bring me harm” (“The Smell of Him”): This song features Toomey at her most soulful, backed by pedal steel, cello, trumpet, keyboards, guitar, and sizzling percussion.

Her collaborations with Tsunami, Liquorice, and Grenadine each produced acclaimed albums and stunning live shows. Toomey’s work with the Future of Music Coalition hopes to make the “virtual tip jar” a way for fans who download MP3s to pay artists directly for their services. There is no doubt that this artist is a visionary; and we could all learn something about moving forward from her.