The general pace is a little more charged this time round, with drummer Darren Jessee driving a spry, Heartbreakers-ish groove, but the vibes remain broadly consistent. I invent things out of thin air, but I’m guided by spirits that came before me.” As with 2016’s Heart Like A Levee, Hallelujah Anyhow sounds like the work of musicians who understand roots music and the southern vernacular in both erudite and intuitive ways. “And I understand tradition to be the most radical blending of emotion and art and intention, otherworldly fullness of spirit. “As I see it, I make traditional music,” Taylor told me recently. That music, as followers of the band will already know, is not exactly revolutionary. There is love, an enduring belief that people are better than this, and an understanding that music shared – with listeners, and with a tight North Carolinan community of players – can have a profound transformative impact. It describes a quest in which he confronts the unnamed iniquities of 2017 and discovers, once again, the tools with which to spiritually repel them. Hallelujah Anyhow, recorded with trusted accomplices over a week this summer, asserts Taylor’s values with a new urgency and pithiness. Hiss Golden Messenger’s albums have long provided uplift and consolation, even when their ostensible subject matter was doubt, and sometimes crisis. “But while I’m here I’m gonna sing just like a songbird.” “Step back, Jack, from the darkness,” runs the refrain of “When The Wall Comes Down”. Ten songs later, he is still rigorously on message. “I’ve never been afraid of the darkness/It’s just a different kind of light,” Taylor sings in the opening “Jenny Of The Roses”, a gorgeous half-sibling to “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love And Understanding” where the rage is replaced with empathy. Critically, though, the encroaching threats are rebuked on almost every occasion, so that the album becomes a testament of metaphysical defiance, a lucid and hard-earned declaration of hope in troubling times. Stormclouds gather, repeatedly a harder rain is forecast to fall. Instead of a specific language of protest and indictment, the lyric sheet is home to 17 uses of either “darkness” or “darker” (more even than in an old issue of Uncut).
Hallelujah Anyhow, the eighth album by MC Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger, is a product of that world, but it features no overt references to our political realities. A letter in last month’s Uncut complained about what the writer perceived as the “anti-Trump sentiment that is threaded across one issue to the next – little jabs sprinkled in album reviews and articles.” Just over half a year into Trump’s presidency, however, how can artists – so many of them, as our correspondent noted disparagingly, “progressive” – articulate themselves without acknowledging that their music now exists in a changed world? In times like these, it is easy to see everything as political.
0 kommentar(er)
