Tracks: Kentucky//I'll Be All Smiles Tonight//Let her Go, God Bless Her//What is Home Without Love?//A Tiny Broken Heart//In the Pines//Alabama//Katie Dear//My Brother's Will//Knoxville Girl//Take the News to Mother//Mary of the Wild Moor
A plain-speaking title for a plain-speaking album – and it’s this very matter-of-factness that gives it strength. The performances on this album are immaculate – Ira and Charley Louvin possess two of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time, and they bring this considerable prowess to bear on the “close-harmony” style of bluegrass they’re working in here. The mono mix twists their voices together until they almost sound like one person, the lines of melody folding over one another beautifully. It sounds like nothing so much as a piano accordion, actually – but that’s hardly a bad thing.
Add to this the understated but highly capable mandolin and guitar work of the duo, laid over a bare framework of bass fiddle and snare drum, and it’s all very simple but very beautiful. None of the songs hurry – they’re all in the same time, at roughly the same BPM. In fact, this is virtually archetypal country music – a bluegrass blueprint, right down to the amazingly depressing lyrics. I mentioned plain-speaking? Well, imagine how positively chilling this album becomes when “Knoxville Girl” appears. The ballad of a man who meets a girl and beats her to death to halt her “dark roving eyes”, it’s very creepy stuff. Or the cover of the Carter Family’s “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight”, a song originally written from the perspective of a young woman which the Louvins don’t even change the gender pronouns in. It gives everything an oddness – this is, I suppose the core of old folk music. The song tells a story, and it’s the story that evokes the emotions. It’s simply the Louvins’ job to document it all with their astonishing voices.
It’s the technical prowess and the strong song selections that really sell this album to modern ears. “Let Her Go” is a sad reflection on lost love that cops the “Sometimes I get a strange notion/to jump in the river and drown” from “Goodnight Irene”. “In the Pines” is a more expansive version of the song familiar to most as “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, and while it might not match the Ledbelly version it’s a very haunting presentation in its own right, with some absolutely beautiful wordless harmonising between the verses that drags pictures of the mountains right up before your eyes.
However, given all the spookery and macabre goings-ons, it’s perhaps somewhat surprising that the most affecting song on the album is actually a rather sweet and innocent little song. “A Tiny Broken Heart” takes the form of a monologue from a six year old boy begging his father to do something to stop the family of itinerants working at the next door farm from moving away and taking their little daughter with them. It’s stuff like this that encapsulates the album – on the one hand, it’s utter cornball, but on the other it’s genuinely and deeply affecting. Another fine song is “Katie Dear”, telling the surreal story of two kids whose parents each keep a knife by them to murder anyone they should happen to fall in love with. It’s very twisted.
I suppose, however, that no album is perfect. If there’s one real complaint it’s that the vocals often lack the sort of heavily invested emotion that we tend to expect from pop music. This is an extremely rigid, formal album. Its restraint gives it great tightness and unity, but on the same hand it does leave a want of breathing space in the music, and can the tracks can bleed together a little.
Still, very fine. I can’t think of much else to say about this. If you strip the rock out of Patsy Cline or polish-up an old Carter Family record you’ll get a pretty good impression of what’s on offer, but it’s all done so damned well. It’s a very strange and touching album.
8 /10
The Louvin Brothers - Knoxville Girl.mp3
No comments:
Post a Comment