The folk home of Allison Crowe’s music on Welcome to Us 1 is a comfortable, warming habitat. Inside, as Hours opens the doors, an accordion plays that particular genre palette, and Crowe’s vocal paints her first of many vibrant and vibrating colours. As a live recording, Crowe’s chats to and with the audience are so full of enthusiasm and a warming sense of genuine modesty. There is no need for a fire around this humble hearth.
The next Juliana
puts that vocal vibrato to the fore and it is on this performance an uplifting
instrument. The slight dissonance in instrumental bent notes and the emotive dirge of the
cello add to the brooding tone. The quintet of musicians on this and whole
album are Allison Crowe (vocals, piano, guitar, fiddle, bodhran), Céline
Sawchuk (cello, vocals), Sarah White (mandolin, guitar, vocals), Dave Baird
(bass, vocals) & Keelan Purchase (accordion, 12-string guitar, bodhran,
harmonica, vocals). A vocal chant/narration he
kept her down sets a further haunt behind the beauty of Crowe’s singing on
this song about an intentional drowning.
Recorded ‘on the lovely isle of Newfoundland’, the folk
inclination is seafaring and contemporary terrestrial. It is often quite raw,
as stated also on the album Bandcamp page, and by this it is in the natural,
unadorned playing. There is a sense of the Bohemian in the song Silence, a slow polka with, again, those
bending string notes and the accordion’s pump and puff, Crowe crystalline in
her vocal role. I like this dip and sway and swagger.
A choric ensemble sweetens Verses, a narrative that leads to and breaks out in Morrison’s Jig; Crowe enthuses about
the many Newfoundland songs learned and played as the intro to Tarry Trousers which is then delivered
in a sublime vocal folk gem; Wedding Song
once more places Crowe’s strong lead within the frame of sweet harmonising
[beautiful again here], and there is another jig in the wonderfully named Gerald Thomas’ Burnt Potato.
Welcome to Us 2 is
the second part of the whole performance, and it is just as fine. But opener I Might sets a jazzier tone, and Céline
Sawchuk on plucked cello helps to spread the sassier ambience. As with the
previous album, all songs are linked either by Crowe’s chats/narrative, or as
here, segues to the next so Shifts of
Light/Tones in Translation follows with a return to the folk tropes – living
with water as a metaphor for learning and surviving, Crowe using tonal shifts
to accentuate the emotion. That sentiment is conveyed through the next
immediate segue to I Am the Air, and
when we arrive at Lisa’s Song it is an
emotive journey.
So the album is unified by the ‘rawness’ [really a relative
term] of performance which is excellent, by Crowe’s varying links, including
that natural ebullience, by the strong sense of strings and accordion [not
ignoring the other] which establish the folksiness but also the often brooding
tones, and of course Crowe’s vocal signature. This leads to what is a rightly well-known
personal cover from Crowe of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah which I think sits here perhaps better than wherever I
have heard it before as a recoding [all good!] because so much has set the tone
for this – and maybe it has been my current reading too of Cohen’s The Flame.
There is much more here and across both discs, but I trust
this conveys a faithful sense of a whole work informed by honest endeavour and
considerable musical beauty. When you buy, you still have the prettiness and
jauntiness of Rare Birds to enjoy,
the singalong of Now I’m 64, more
vocal accompaniment on penultimate Bird
Set Free, and then the rousing close of the Suite.
WtoU1 here.
WtoU2 here.
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