She sounds like the daughter of Marlene Dietrich and Odetta would nature allow such a thing. She is blessed with vocal range only the Buckleys, father and son, have been able to impress with in popular music and she shares their guts to cross musical frontiers. With her first studio release, she effortlessly shows most of her more famous and commercially successful fellow singer/songwriters the ropes. For years Dayna Kurtz must have been the best kept secret in American music, but with Postcards From Downtown there is no secret to keep anymore and I'm ready to stand on anybody's coffee table to preach the gospel. What makes this album special is not only Dayna's impressive vocal range and the subtlety with which she "plays" her voice like Bird played his saxophone, it's not only her masterful guitar playing, her ability to tell stories and to choose all the right instruments to make all the right noises at all the right moments. What puts Postcards From Downtown into a different league is that, like the best of America's urban crime novels, it can be smelled, tasted and felt. It's full of danger, seedy sex and crazed characters with every single "postcard" describing an emotional landscape of painful turmoil. The tension built up with the first gloomy sounds of a cello on the opening song "Fred Astaire" never weakens.

"Fred Astaire " and "Love Gets In The Way" are brutally honest songs about love and sex in the Lucinda Williams vein. "Downtown" is obviously a different setting than Louisiana, and the music played in smoky barrooms here is not honky-tonk. The accordions in Kurtz' songs don't play cajun, but French musette waltzes against a backdrop of blues and jazz and deranged Eastern European gypsy music. The characters in Kurtz' songs are desperate, looking for someone or something to hold on to, but most of the time they seem to be clinging to thin air. Sometimes, they drown with their boots on like the boy in "Somebody Leave A Light On."

He was blessed, the best of us
and now the boy is gone
he was so beautiful and stupid
he'd go swimming with his boots on

What sounds just like Jeff Buckley's tragic story in the beginning, turns into a general description of feeling lost.

You spend too much time with strangers
you spend too much time alone
you need someone to leave a light on
when you're headed home

The title track, beautifully introduced by Kurtz on slide guitar, is the angry account of someone who's been "around the block" quite a few times and maybe one time too often. "I lost my faith in love," Kurtz starts her cry of the heart.

I know how to take in all kinds
of heartless offers
and I've learned how to hand back a few
and I've come as close to love
as to walking on water

Pissed and disillusioned, she promises her ex-lover, "I'll send you some/postcards from downtown/I'll show you all the apartmensts/where I got my degrees."

In "Miss Liberty" Kurtz takes the story of love and disillusionment a step further over a crazed string quartet, drums, and an acoustic bass that walks aggressively through the whole mess.

I'm Miss Liberty - give me your junkies
your irrisponsible drummers
I've swept my halls clean of clean,
your kitchen raiders
your wingtip dayrunners

When we die I hope someone's God
takes us in like immigrants
and we'll make love in the leftover light
of heaven's tenements

And somehow these seem the most humane and comforting lines on the album so far. As if she is aware of the listener's exhaustion, "Last Good Taste," a quiet jazz ballad, is like an oasis of peace in a landscape of turmoil, even if the two lovers whose story is told "don't have a prayer" and "don't have a plan."

Man, it's good to see your face
I've been living out of suitcases
you know you were the last good taste
I've had of love

"Monroe" is neither about Bill nor Marilyn, though its main character has something of both of them in him. He's a tortured genius who never quite makes it and is at the point of losing it completely. That "we can stage dive off of porches/into a crowd of dandelions and be just fine" seems an inadequate consolation.

"Paterson" is the name of a "sad northern New Jersey factory town" where Dayna spends half of her time. It's the sort of town we all know. Some of us were born there and some of us never succeeded to get away far enough from it early enough to stay away from it for good. It's the sort of town where

Every sad old poppa was a proud young man
full of victories that he almost won
all the mistakes that we made
pave the streets of Paterson

Ending in a strange mixture of Italian accordion music against a backdrop of what sounds like drunken Russian voices, "Paterson" is a beautiful, touching ode to all the people who don't make it in life.

In "Just Like Jack" a cocky acoustic bass struts through the song just as self-assured as its main character whom everybody loves, because he "blew the dust of this town." But whereas the Jacks come and go, Kurtz' female character has a different story to tell.

with all I got to keep me here
the baby and my mother
I'll probably live forever
and have nothing new to say

The final song is one of bitter-sweet beauty and surprising surrender to fate.

A dream is dying
so comfort me tonight
the clock is lying
I never got it right
I lost the fight
but it's alright

It's a very moving and shocking ending to an album full of struggle and turmoil. It leaves you behind with an aching emptiness in your guts.

Postcards From Downtown should win Dayna Kurtz all the Grammy's Come Away With Me won Norah Jones last time. Somehow something tells me that this won't happen. But whatever happens, the message on my postcard from downtown is loud and clear: Dayna rules.

*www.daynakurtz.com

Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net