Good Boys Don't" by Skye
Review: "Good Boys Don't" by Skye by Mark Kirby, 
While having a quiet meal at an out-of-the way Italian place and talking with my bartender, Wade, one of his down-low-on-a-Sunday customers was looking at some CDs produced by her rapper ex-boyfriend. She didn't have a guitar but she had wine and liquor-fueled honesty, and an audience of one woman, three gay men and me.
"He is a jack ass. Great lay, though, best lay ever," she said. This woman was voluptuous, to say the least. "But he found a wee little thing of a girl, real skinny, with piercings and tattoos. He's rockin' her but he was rockin' homegirl, too. Soon enough, she'll get tired of his sh-t." I thought of this scene as I listened to cuts from the CD Good Boys!
Don't by Skye, a 19-year-old singer and songwriter from Long Island.
Her music deals with the deeply personal terrain of relationships and the emotional roller coasters they entail. Whereas the anti-folk folks use punk rockishness for shock value in their dashboard confessionals, and emo indie types sing from the shoe and navel (gazing), Skye is raw in that her songs are less more like first-person narratives that put the listener right in the middle of the action, whether it involves confrontation (the title cut and "Desperately Waiting," among others) or escape ("From Below").
The song "Good Boys Don't" finds Skye up in the face of a lying man who commits the ultimate sin. It has a polished hard rock sound featuring rolling bass by Dave Burnett and heavy duty drums by Jocken Rueckert that rumble along like Dave Grohl did back in the freewheeling Nirvana days. Clearly she is looking for the band to provide the oomph to express the feeling behind lines like: "You are like a parasite crawling along the bottom of my life waiting to kill me for my place in line" and "Good boys don't tell lies your smile isn't fooling' anyone."
"Desperately Waiting" is a little softer and more nuanced, with Aaron Knaves playing acoustic guitars mixed in with electric guitars, and providing the sharp hooks here and throughout the CD. The lyrics are in the mold of personal confession, but this comes from the point of view of being in the field, in the middle of a dramatic situation: "Fights like these... tears and broken words are starting to wear thin / Can't you trust me for once?" The music rises and falls according to the emotions expressed and builds to a climax that is at once pure pop and hard rock, with a subtle, non cliched ending, more of a magic carpet ride than a slam-bam crash. "Fine Tonight" has country rock guitar lines that could be at home on Country Music Television and plain as day storytelling that would make Shania Twain jealous and shows surprising maturity in someone so young.
Emotional intensity revs back up on the cut "From Below" and the music reacts accordingly. It follows the old grunge formula of soft on the verse, - "She pounds her feet relentlessly into the pavement / the miles just fade away beneath her flying heels / and though his ghost is right behind her she doesn't need it to remind her the nightmare she was headed for comes real/" - with guitars that are trippy and country tinged and then hard on the chorus which is where the action is with hard-hitting guitar, phat bass and slamming drums - "and as she rides her own artificial night and the light will even touch her face she will find she become a wanderer / and her soul has lost its resting place." 
On this and the other songs on
Good Boys Don't, Skye pulls no punches in telling it like it is. To complete her journey of emotional conflict and turbulence, while serving up yet another surprise, the last cut "Get It Together" captures a moment when she gets some hardcore advice from her mother, "Get it together, baby, where is the strength in the eyes of the daughter I raised?" This song, and the rest of the CD, is a reply to the sad-sack whiny indulgence of emo and so much of indie rock. Indeed, this song treads on ground rarely touched by today's indie rock but was found quite often in soul: instructional songs where advice about aspects of life were the stuff of hits ("Momma Didn't Lie" by Fontella Bass; "Momma Said" by The Shirelles). This song, like the others on this crisp, lean 7 song CD, finds Skye and her top notch band matching the music to the lyrics and story.
It's no wonder, though it is surprising - she is an unsigned artist, after all - that the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences Committee has placed Skye on the Official Ballot for the 2008 Grammy Awards in the categories of Record of the Year (for the song "Hope It Helps"), Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Best Pop Vocal Album. After reading the recent Rolling Stone Magazine where Bruce Springsteen talks about how he always tries to write songs that are personal and about something and considering how so much of today's so-called indie rock is obtuse, laconic and vague, it is nice to hear Skye -- whose music has passion and a jagged edge which cuts to the nitty-gritty of personal drama -- making it relevant and to the rest of us listeners. Now ain't that what it's all about?
Provided by the MusicDish Network. Copyright © MusicDish LLC 2007 - Republished with Permission
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