Leslie & the Badgers spend much of their time playing bars in Los Angeles, a point made in the delicate opening track "Los Angeles" on their second full-length album,
Roomful of Smoke. It's a song that probably couldn't be heard above the din in most bars, but you can't say that about much of the rest of the album. Leslie Stevens has a baby-doll voice with a country accent (she's from Missouri), reminiscent of
Emmylou Harris and
Maria Muldaur, and it's mixed well above her accomplished band, which plays elegant country-folk arrangements for most of the disc. Charlene Huang is credited with violin, but her playing much of the time is the sort that people call fiddling. That changes about halfway through the disc, however. After "Americans in Rome," the band seems to continue a European trip into the former Iron Curtain countries, as they begin "What Fall Promised" with a classically influenced solo by Huang, followed by a tune that would earn them applause in any bar in Hungary. But then, country music is universal these days, and if Leslie & the Badgers hardly sound like what's coming out of Nashville, they are well in the tradition of the country-rock L.A.'s been turning out for 40 years.
