Tabatha And Her Friends (1996)

1 year after her mother's death, Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell), and her friends started experiencing some strange phone calls.

Rothberg is one of the (few) post-Alanis women whose stance is more complicated than outraged one minute, cautiously loving the next. Her songs about relationships are complicated and often ambiguous, and she is equally unflinching in her descriptions of the successes and failures she has witnessed. Strongly rooted in the singer/songwriter aesthetic of one woman and her guitar, the songs on Between the 1 and the 9 are fleshed out a bit with other instruments but retain their edge. The biggest surprise here is in the maturity of her voice, which gives the songs their immediacy and intimacy.

Sammy Kershaw knows the sights and smells of true honky tonks, but he keeps moving further away from the soulful slur and fun-loving style that made him sound so promising a few years ago. After too many novelty songs and mis-directed pop-country moves, Kershaw tries to focus himself and get serious on Politics, Religion and Her. Unfortunately, his material fails him. A couple of powerful, soul-baring ballads only serve to show how superficial the rest of the song choices are. And his stiff version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" would get the vote for worst cover of the year, except it gets topped by his pale take on Sammy Johns's ludicrous '70s hit, "Chevy Van."