Dusty Trails.

They used to rock, but now alt-grrrls Josephine Wiggs and Vivian Trimble get smooth and steamy

Dusty Trails * Dusty Trails * Atlantic

Josephine Wiggs and Vivian Trimble have famous, intertwined alt-rock credentials--both belonged to seminal (ovular?) women's bands: Wiggs played bass for the Breeders, and Trimble played keyboards for Luscious Jackson. The two now-defunct groups even seemed "married" for a while, because Wiggs had a romance with Luscious Jackson drummer Kate Schellenbach.

But now Wiggs and Trimble have reconfigured themselves into Dusty Trails, a duo quite different from the bands they came from. The Trails (the Dustys?) aren't country, though one of the songs on their self-titled debut CD is "Fool for a Country Tune." They also aren't Luscious Jackson Meets the Breeders--except maybe on "Roll the Dice," on which Luscious Jackson's Jill Cunniff shares vocals. (Schellenbach also guests on drums for two cuts.)

Rather, they have purposefully stepped into a 1960s European film sound track of their own invention, full of slick cocktail jazz--some bossa nova here, some French lyrics there, and just enough modern sonic sensibility to take the music into the 21st century.

Perhaps Dusty Trails is a natural "I'm almost 40!" reaction to the relentlessness of rock and hip-hop: Let's get mellow now. Half the songs are instrumentals featuring the many talents of each gal. Wiggs handles bass, guitars, drums, and bongos; Trimble plays keyboards, acoustic guitar, and accordion. On the songs with lyrics (written by Trimble; the music is a joint effort), Trimble takes the lead with her sweet but thin voice while Wiggs sings backup.

As a whole the CD is relentlessly pleasant--dreamy, a little wistful, a bit insecure about love ("Try to hold you in my hand / Slip through fingers shifty like sand," Trimble sings in "You Freed Yourself"). But it does sharpen its edge on one cut, "Order Coffee," thanks to guest vocalist Emmylou Harris, who invests the lyric "Order coffee, drink it really slow / 'Cause after that I gotta go" with a world-weariness that the rest of the CD seems to la-di-da its way past.

Hard to know if this is the start of an ongoing collaboration or a one-shot project--as both Wiggs (who put out a few singles of cover songs with Schellenbach) and Trimble (who was part of a Luscious Jackson offshoot called the Kostars, which Wiggs produced) have been wont to do. But it's nice to know that rock heroines of the '90s are carving new trails into the '00s.

Kort is writing a book on singer-songwriter Laura Nyro for St. Martin's.