Album review: Carrie Rodriguez, Give Me All You Got (Ninth Street Opus)

There's a fine line in everything. Perhaps the most dangerous one in American roots music divides "tasteful" from "polite".

Bestriding it deftly is Austin's Carrie Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter and fiddle player of great accomplishment and tastefulness, but such a polite vocal presence that her songs barely emerge, blushing, from their lovely arrangements. A bit like Rickie Lee Jones with the sauce sucked out. They're good songs too, many of them. Nice is the word.