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DAILY RECORD: Gillian Welch
Posted by: Necci – Jul 25, 2011
Gillian Welch – The Harrow And The Harvest (Acony Records)
The title of Gillian Welch's newest effort goes a long way towards covering her whole approach. On the most literal level, there's the rustic imagery that so much Americana strives to incorporate – the farming implement and the end result of its use. But the respective halves of the phrase also call to mind the best parts of Welch's music, namely its reliance on a harrowing gravity that refuses to fall into one-dimensional gloom – an aesthetic from which Welch has harvested material of a rare consistency. Welch and performing companion David Rawlings proved themselves capable interpreters of disparate musical traditions with albums like Hell Among The Yearlings and Time (The Revelator), treading pathways through an America both mythical and undeniably real, standing at a crossroads of the ancient and the modern, blurring lines between the understated and the virtuosic, and making music that sounds equally like it had been made today and as if it had been made a hundred years ago.
While Welch and Rawlings have produced a largely compelling body of work, theirs is music that takes time to make a point. There are no cheap tricks, only ambling chord progressions, prickly lead guitar, and tightly-entwined vocal harmonies that slowly unfold over the course of each song. It should come as little surprise, then, that their pacing can be equally deliberate when releasing albums as it is when actually performing on them – the only real surprise might be the rapid succession in which the duo produced their first three records. It's been eight years since their previous release, 2003's Soul Journey, and it seems that Welch and Rawlings took their time to create something that wouldn't be as largely lambasted as that album was (whether these were fair assessments is a different story – Soul Journey may not have held up well to Welch's other albums, but certainly wasn't bad when judged on its own terms). The duo took years, scrapping a great many songs along the way, and the results justify the extended absence.
Whereas its predecessor tried to expand upon the template of Welch's earliest releases by incorporating a wider variety of instrumentation and sonic texture, The Harrow And The Harvest is a successful album because it offers no surprises whatsoever to any listener familiar with Welch's oeuvre. The only real variation is the degree to which the songs seem to reference different concepts of folk music. Rather than focusing on singular concepts – the gothic Americana of Revival or the loose Laurel Canyon folk rock of Soul Journey, for instance – this newest release blends facets of the style's various strains into something that is simultaneously coherent and divergent. It is particularly to the artists' credit that they can incorporate subtle elements that recall a particular era without paying overt tribute. Southern music's Anglo-Celtic roots filter into bluegrass's stripped-down propulsion, both are smoothed out with an injection of the sort of waltz tempo with which mid-20th Century country was enamored, and the whole thing is overlaid with the dour mentality of the generation of post-hippie folk singers who came to understand that singing Pete Seeger songs around a camp fire can't save man from himself. This cross-referencing would likely seem trite in less capable hands, and become the sort of thing that causes Welch's detractors to bristle (not so much the references exactly, but that she – Manhattan-born and California-raised, seen as a sort of musical carpetbagger – would deign to make them).
But individual reference points fail to adequately sum up the music, and are useful primarily for identifying the traps that Welch and Rawlings fail to fall into. The duo proves themselves capable of songwriting that defies genre expectations and sets their music far apart from their peers, a facility that affects both the music and lyrics. Rawlings's solo on opener “Scarlet Town” almost seems pointillist, darting between high and low passages as if alternating between bits of multiple simultaneous solos in order to paint a larger sonic picture than an average lead guitarist would. And while Welch has never shied away from dark lyrical subject matter, a song like “That's The Way That It Goes” – replete with depictions of drug abuse, prostitution, and murder, interspersed with the title phrase as a resigned refrain – casts a steely eye on humanity's dark excesses and the means by which mankind is driven apart and turned on itself. The gaze just as easily takes a personal turn, such as in “Tennessee,” an unnamed (and possibly autobiographical, though it's often a mistake to conflate an author and their creations) narrator reflecting on the way that childhood religious instruction can crumble away into metaphysical dust when subjected to the rigors of the here and now.
While there is no shortage of artists attempting to capture the world in the darkest hues, the ground on which they tread is often well-covered. All the more reason that The Harrow And The Harvest is a rarity – it's tribute without imitation, an ingestion and reconfiguring of influence without anachronism. It's an approach that meanders down the lost highways of American consciousness, acknowledging signposts but not abiding by them. It's readily accessible but doesn't hesitate to push downwards into the darker recesses of the psyche – fertile territory that Welch and Rawlings have once again proven themselves extremely capable of mining.
By Graham Scala
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