Nancy Andrews & Linda Smith - A Passing Cloud

New collection of decade spanning tracks from DIY icon, Linda Smith, and former housemate & collaborator, Nancy Andrews. Their shared story runs back 40 years to 1983 when the pair lived together in a large house in Baltimore alongside a number of other creatives. What Smith did after this has now passed into semi-legend thanks to Sky Girl and various archival endeavours. Nancy Andrews' story isn't really documented in the same way having pursued a career as animator and filmmaker rather than musician. Regardless, what A Passing Cloud does most markedly is speak of enduring friendship, community and a shared vision. These twelve tracks originally stem from a set of Andrews' recordings from the early 90s that Smith re-discovered recently, thus setting off a chain events which saw the two collaborate remotely over time during the pandemic, re-writing and refining the originals using lyrics lifted from a range of unpublished pulp fiction by Andrews. There's a charming purity to the results, songs that very much sound transmitted from a lost era, a product of the 90s US underground and replete with its independent spirit and guile. Released then when they were first written, would they have been considered grunge-adjacent? Possibly, but then only if you see luminaries such as Mary Lou Lord, Tanya Donelly and the Deal sisters in the same way i guess. Which means we're talking strong female voices with a defined sense of self and tenacity to sidestep convention and expectation. 40 years in the game, Smith and Andrews still show themselves as torch bearers for that ideal.