The Ginn Sisters

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electric-and-acoustic strings dominating the instrumentation, to the hard honky-tonk themes of many of their songs, the Ginn Sisters are wrapped up in country's Texas roots.

They diverge from country music in their total avoidance of sentimentality and ease. The recent Ginn Sisters album Blood Oranges (whose cover shows red orange halves being crushed by a pair of hands) includes grimly detailed investigations of the span of time in which substance abuse drives someone off a cliff. In "Down the Drain" ("you've got everything goin' for you, right down the drain") and "Hard Fall" ("it's a hard fall from Saturday night"), the figure involved is a friend or lover of the song's female narrator, but just as often the narrator herself is a full participant in a bad situation. "Get It and Go" ("there's only one thing that you came here for") is a remarkable dissection of an end-stage relationship in which the physical component still makes up a kind of ongoing addiction. It's a difficult theme for a songwriter to carry off without making either of the parties into the villain, but that's just what Tiffani Ginn, who writes most of the duo's material, does here.