Angel Fire Scottsboro AL

Angel Fire

The Kennedys

Philo / Rounder Records, 1998

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/07/1999

There's something comfortable about The Kennedys. Endearing, even.

For a husband-and-wife folk-rock duo operating in the late 1990s, that's a sharp double-edged sword. Chances are slim you're going to win fame and fortune in this flash-and-trash modern world we're stuck in by being comfortable and endearing.

Yet Pete and Maura Kennedy, bless their hearts, behave as though oblivious to the deafening roar of American society's increasing drive to consume itself in a mad whirl of idol worship/destruction and materialistic excess. Consciously, willfully, aggressively oblivious? Maybe so...

In any case, instead of wallowing in all this free-floating negativity, they write coffee-house intellectual songs that celebrate nature, poetry, legends, romance and a sort of latter-day flower-child political philosophy. All the while, they earnestly cite Henry David Thoreau, T.S. Eliot, Anton Chekhov, Rainer Maria Rilke and Czech President Vaclav Havel as sources of inspiration.