Narrow Line

You’d be hard pressed to pinpoint the origins of Canadian folk duo Mama’s Broke. Their album Narrow Line more than hints at Americana, but also at Celtic balladry, Eastern Europe and Eastern Canada — one of the duo hails from Nova Scotia. It’s fairly dark stuff with songs that brood on a world gone, well, if not entirely wrong, certainly not entirely right. Lisa Maria and Amy Lou Keeler sing and play together as though they’ve been doing it all their lives, not surprising given their pre-pandemic years on tour. Their sound, hinging on close harmonies, banjo and fiddle, can be full and layered, but also strip right down, for instance on the stark ballad ‘October’s Lament’.

There’s a kind of musical sameness to some songs, but the lyrics go in all directions. The eerie ‘God’s Little Boy’, for example, about the sad reality of young men who seek violence against women. Or the album’s title-track, which touches on violence against immigrants, wealth disparity, rape culture, climate destruction and trauma. But even with such weighty subject matter ‘Narrow Line’ has a kind of wistful sweetness, the lyrics concluding: ‘We can’t hold it all, our hands are just too small. Best we can do is break up time, and keep it on a narrow line.’