Adron

Adron (New Street)

By Marcell Minaya
Published: July 6th, 2008 | 9:00am

Long gone are the days of pipe-busting vocals, pounding acoustic guitar riffs, and angst-ridden piano strokes; for the most part, it seems that the new wave of female singer-writers have traded in the ‘90s template for more wholesome compositions. Fortunately, there are some still some ladies paying homage to the subdued genre of yore: veterans from Cat Power to Kimya Dawson still dig deep, and now the ever-blooming Adrienne McCann — known as Adron — can be added to that list. The sweet-faced Chicago native is a child prodigy and multi-lingual singer of English, French, and Portuguese. From the age of four, Adron was classically trained on the piano and self-taught on the guitar as a pre-adolescent — she used Beck songs as guidance for her earliest strumming.

Adron’s charming self-titled debut is endearingly comprised of delightful musical idiosyncrasies. Each song is a uniquely wrapped gift of instrumentals, love melodies, and the trivial. “Undefined” is a 12-minute epic descending into the sounds of a crashing sea and her sandy footsteps, pausing into silence and then lunging into foreign-tongue bliss. On “Never Leave My Room Again,” 20-year-old Adron plays the guitar like an old soul with beautiful subtlety and ease — you can’t help but replay this tune over and over.

The debut shows Adron's remarkable ability to interweave soft and sweet perfectly, without making it too accessible. Whether she's tinkling guitar strings or releasing sparse vocals or passionate wails — which often include echoing eccentricities like humming, whistling, and clicking — it's apparent that her musicianship is channeled through a more modest introspect.

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