The Judds, Wynonna and Naomi, are a daughter-mother team with the distinctive gimmick of their relationship plus their striking looks and the backing of Nashville`s most aggressive record-marketing firm. But those are only the reasons the Judds have risen so rapidly. They aren`t the reasons the Judds have risen at all.
The primary reason is not only their talent but, and maybe more important, their ability to communicate an infectious excitement that is a little reminiscent, in a latter-day female way, of the aura that used to surround such an act as the Everly Brothers.
Country music has had a few solo females who tried to give off that sort of heat and failed because they didn`t have it in them. The Judds, by contrast, appear to do it without really trying.
Wynonna`s lead singing runs the gamut from growls to screams, with plenty of the softest kind of femaleness in the middle; she seems to be able to do anything from hard-country to near-rock.
But a very significant part of the credit for the Judds` sound must be given to the imagination, the skill and the fire of guitarist Don Potter, who on this, the Judds` first full-size LP, instantly sets the mood of fully half the cuts with some of the freshest, most dramatic guitar work heard lately on a vocal album; the five cuts are the current hit single ”Why Not Me,”
”Drops Of Water,” ”My Baby`s Gone,” ”Girls Night Out” and the golden oldie ”Endless Sleep.”
These five songs are all hot, varying only in degree (with ”Endless Sleep” being the least effective). After each of them is placed a ballad, so the other half of the album is slower. There is some fine, if less spectacular, work here, too, in such songs as ”Mr Pain,” a nice one from the pen of Naomi; the also-imaginative lyric ”Sleeping Heart”; the Jimmie Rodgers-ish ”Bye Bye Baby Blues” (complete with yodel); and the recent hit single, ”Mama He`s Crazy.” One other slower one, the more contemporary-sounding ”Love Is Alive,” is the album`s least-memorable cut.
To sum up, this is an album well-designed to blast the Judds into the next stage of their meteoric rise.
