Having formed after a handful of backstage singing sessions and one particularly opportune bathroom meeting, Tres Chicas—consisting of Lynn Blakey (Let’s Active, Glory Fountain), Tonya Lamm (Hazeldine) and Caitlin Cary (Whiskeytown)—might be described as the first all-woman alt.country supergroup. Sweetwater is an overwhelmingly country-inflected album (not surprising given their collective résumés), dealing fairly heavily in traditional nomenclature with sweet sisterly harmonies and urgent tales of alternately brokenhearted and fallen women crawling toward better lives.
As the group displays a penchant for trading in stock metaphor, the inclusion of a tough-minded cover of Loretta Lynn’s “Deep As Your Pocket” and a hoedown clap-along rendition of George Jones’ “Take the Devil Out of Me” seem entirely appropriate. “Desire,” a track which personifies a number of character traits (Trying, Hoping, Waiting, etc.) plays with the patois, its lyric turning downright absurd with lines like “I asked Desire to consider a threesome / She told me she’d give it a try,” but the album isn’t all country pastiche. While the argument can be made that none of the songwriters involved are offering their A-material here, many of the original compositions remain quite strong.
The delicately aching “When You Sleep” and near-suffocating loneliness of “In a While” offer great hooks while allowing Cary to apply some tasteful violin solos. Sweetwater feels a bit more like friends having a good time than a truly serious long-term endeavor, but even if this proves the trio’s only appearance on record, its perfect three-part harmonies will inhabit a special place in the alt.country panoply.