You & I

To be oneself is the key to The Pierces success

The Pierces keep playing little games with the music industry. Since sister Catherine and Allison released their debut album The Pierces in 2000, many have been waiting for the singers to start a great process of style adjustment. Actually, nobody thought that two good-looking American young ladies with taste for music and big performing talent would be playing what might have been seen as long gone into the past. They seemed a perfect tandem to become just another reliable supplier of quality contemporary pop. It turned out that pop music was just one of the ingredients in The Pierces music recipe, and that was old-school pop, by the way. It is not for nothing that the duet is from time to time compared with ABBA. The second key constituent of the Alabamian duo’s music is folk, the music that seems to be living just in everyone who inhabits the South of the States. OK, they played their stuff, toyed with genres; and now it is time to think about the commercial side of the whole affair, right? Right, but not every musician is supposed to follow the format when it comes to improving financial state.

Music with rich past

By the time of the release of The Pierces’ fourth full-length, You & I, in the summer of 2001, the duet had made their music a highly demanded product as they recorded a number of songs for movies and TV soundtracks and shot videos for leading music channels. In brief, You & I is a work that looks like a good match to the rest of the duo’s catalogue. Although the album is rich in moments when you are about exclaim ‘This, surely, has already been done before!’, the songs posses an amazing kind of attractiveness or catchiness. The highlights, as expected, are the singles, You’ll Be Mine, and Glorious, in which the influence of the seventies’ pop-stage is particularly strong. Glorious is also the best demonstration of those little, yet pleasant, changes that take part in The Pierces music development. Heavy use of violins and deep, with some references to always hard-to-touch issues of spirituality, lyrics move the duo’s style slightly farther from the simplistic, sometimes rather emotional than intelligent, folk that lies at the beginning of their way. The content of many tracks from You & I is impacted by the events in the private life of one of the sisters, Catherine, who has recently gone through a painful parting. Apparently, Love You More, It Will Not Be Forgotten, I Put Your Records On are connected with it.

You & I deserves all the praise

Repeatedly discussed on You & I, the topic of broken relationship and missing a loved one forms an illusion that the album is recorded not by a duet, but by one person. This person, evidently, lived the whole drama and decided to imprint the memories and feelings in this record. But the reason lies in the coordinated work and understanding each other shared by the sisters, who, unexpectedly for listeners, grew more mature and brought up more serious subjects. While the first records from The Pierces are shy efforts to show oneself to the world ad to sing something not everyone would want or be able to accept, You & I is a work by confident performers. Now, it is difficult to imagine these singers in any different role, playing anything beyond it. They managed to get to a genre that seemed to sink into oblivion, and put it into a form that has no time limits. Insistently playing what they always wanted to play, The Pierces will have their music recognized, appreciated and loved. The music deserves it, and so do its makers.