Maggie Teachout: Maybe I'm Still Just Peter (Green Monkey)

On the small but admirably persistent Green Monkey label out of the US Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Olympia) comes this debut by 18-year old singer-songwriter Maggie Teachout who fires off a 13-song volley of rocking indie-folk and more intimate ballads where at the upbeat end of her spectrum sounds she like a one-woman Violent Femmes (Colourblind, Lemonade Day) and at the other the poetry-reading offspring of Michelle Shocked (Vinegar, the indie-pop of Make a Sound and Indie Movie Romance, Waitress).

She doesn't have the most attractive voice at times and her urgency can err towards the grating (Waitress with its almost early Dylan whine'n'vowel drag).

But lyrically she has some of that cleverly faux-naive style of Jonathan Richman alongside a preternatural maturity as on the terrific Waltz for My Daughter (with her younger sister Ruby) and the enjoyable absurdly wordy Cosmos where she reveals some serious vocal power, and the similarly flat-tack lyrically crowded Motherfucker.

She's on a small local label with very little “market penetration”, as they say, and so this is a debut which will go right past just about everyone in the overly-crowded music supermarket.

But on the evidence here (especially in the last half on songs like Waltz for My Daughter, Heart of the Artist, Still Standing) she's someone we could well hear more of.

Let's hope so.

Elsewhere has some considerable affection for the idiosyncratic Green Monkey label and has assidiously followed its progress and releases for the last 15 years. See here.

We commend the label's extensive catalogue to you.