Wonderful Expectations
The one original song on the album, Is It Too Much? co-written by Lynne and Moore, is a plaintive,
questioning yearn for commitment and care to share a burden, the lamenting
guitar-work carrying it along emotively. The vocal harmonising is beautiful,
and the answer is of course how this singing together here and a lifetime of
shared experience binds the sisters closely and poignantly.
The other songs are covers of variously Bob Dylan, The
Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard, Nick Cave, Nirvana, Jason Isbell/Amanda Shires
and others.
The more overtly contemporary songs get a mixed rendition:
The Killers’ My List starts the album
and is Band-like, it seems to me, anthemic organ and piano rises, and the vocal
harmonies sweetly tight as they will be throughout the album; Nirvana’s Lithium is bound to engender the poles
of liking, its ‘heaviness’ either a welcome tangent or intrusive divergence
from the whole, the dissonant harmonies totally in keeping with the song’s
origins and, for me, a stroke of fun, the line I’m so horny seeming quite corny in the lyrical surrounds of all
the others on the album.
They took a risk. The Louvin Brothers’ Every Time You Leave is more classic Country lament and bears the
production affection for such from Teddy Thompson who has overseen the whole
project. Dylan’s title track is delivered with marching percussion, organ
underpinning, and individual/dueting vocals that rise in emotion with the organ
and piano scoring.
The Isbell/Squires song The
Color of a Cloudy Day is a pretty song prettily delivered here, and Merle
Haggard’s Silver Wings follows this
with exquisite vocal harmonising as well as crisp soloing – obvious, but these
vocal are simply superb. I don’t believe
in an interventionist god is the great opening line from Nick Cave’s Into My Arms and its assertion belies
the tender love song it is and which gets sung with a sensitive asserting of
love by the sisters here. This is gorgeous.
The whole album is essentially gorgeous. Subtle throughout, this
will grow with playing as the fine nuances become expectations. On my fourth
play, those expectations are always met with such pleasure.
No comments:
Post a Comment