SOUL SURMISE

ROBBIE ROBERTSON - SINEMATIC

It is hard to believe that a record by a legend of rock music for over 55 years, guitarist when Bob Dylan went electric and main writer in the iconic The Band could shank out unnoticed but I wasn’t the only fan to miss the release of Robbie Robertson’s new album Sinematic. Thank you Gar Saeger for having it in your 2019 Records of the Year and tipping me off!

It is a shame to have been such a secret. It is a work of deep quality. Not that we would expect anything else from Robbie Robertson but I have to say that this for me is the most satisfying Robertson solo record since his eponymous debut in 1987. 

With the Oscars coming up in February it is cutting edge that the lead off track is I Hear You Paint Houses, a line from the film that Robertson did the soundtrack for. Morrison as a De Niro type character works for me!

Morrison is not the only Irishman helping out on Sinematic. Glen Hansard features on the political comment song Let Love Reign, my personal favourite. Best featured vocalist of all is Felicity Williams Particularly on Walk In Beauty Way. 

Robbie Robertson’s memoir Testimony rates, in my opinion as one of the best ever rock biographies and it is hard to imagine that it didn’t impact Sinematic. Dead End Kid and has particular autobiographical detail. I love that it mentions the Scarborough Bluffs a beautiful area of one of my favourite cities Toronto where Robertson grew up.

Robertson has rarely been so introspective or so keen on political opinion: - 

 

As world leaders take us

On a guided tour of Hell 

Let love reign!

 

The spiritual dabs in and out too. Morrison sings 

 

Hope my father up above

Will forgive me for my sins 

 

That is not the end of the spiritual. Some of us, Robertson says are Hardwired to God:

 

People falling to their knees

Tryin' to keep the faith

There's a man upstairs lookin' down

With pity on the human race

 

Most of all Let Love Reign takes a lead from the teaching of Jesus:

 

Oh, let love reign

On your enemy

Let love reign down

Over you and me

 

And has a prayer time too:

 

In my time, we’ve bowed our heads

In sorrow of mankind

Raisin' hope that tomorrow

There may peace of mind

 

Right across Sinematic there is that smooth gentle blues atmosphere that only Robertson can conjure. What lifts Sinematic above his other five records is the subject matter and songwriting. Writing a biography and working on soundtracks with Martin Scorsese has led Robertson into the seam of a rich zone. 

KATHLEEN TURNER - LIKE A LION

Was it Bob Dylan who coined the “best kept secret” when he wrote about Paul Brady in his liner notes to Biography in 1985? There have been a lot of “best kept secrets’ in all corners of the musical world ever since.

The seismic shifts in the music industry these past ten years have made it a whole lot more possible to be a “best kept secret”. You no longer need to be signed by a record label to bring out records. Recording technology, the mp3 and social media have meant that the only thing needed to make a good record is a good artist. It also means that a singer’s value or sense of worth is no longer in platinum discs, the size of your Malibu swimming pool or cocaine intake!

So, you could be a Community Engagement Manager for the Irish Chamber Orchestra, a vocal tutor at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance the conductor of the BA in Voice and Dance Gospel Choir and the former conductor of the Limerick Gospel Choir and the University of Limerick Gospel Choir and have released two impressive eps and an album and not be at all known.

So Kathleen Turner’s first full record Like A Lion almost sneaks out without hoopla. Finding a review on the web is not even easy. Don’t be fooled by this being a secret. It is an exceptionally good record.

Kathleen has this voice. It is so powerfully pure and she uses it in these songs that somehow blend and blur the songwriting genre with Aretha soul. Kathleen’s voice gives her songs a dramatic effect. Actually, I want to replace drama with strength. 

These songs have the strength of a lion but there is no arrogance. These are the songs of a woman standing up and finding her voice and seeking her way through love and life. Titles like Puzzle alongside Courage explain the mission.

For me the linchpin song is the utterly brilliant Shake The Dust:

 

Shake the dust off your feet, get walking girl

Get yourself on the road less traveled

Shake the dust off your feet and getting walking girl

Take your shoes off

 

All ends with the tenderest Little Star. Like an Irish Blessing is unaccompanied and that voice stands out. It is beautiful, spiritual, compassionate and hopeful.

Everything on the record is arranged to perfection. It is maybe the only other thing a good artist needs to make a good record. A sensitive partner/producer. Sean Óg Graham is exactly that. His guitar flair touches and Conor McCreaney’s double bass. Consummate.

Soul Surmise is at its very happiest when it introduces you to best kept musical secrets. Happy Christmas!

BLUE RODEO - MERRIE CHRISTMAS TO YOU

Christmas Americana straight outta Canada!

Blue Rodeo. My favourite Canadian band. I have 15 of their albums! Some Soul Surmise readers might be aware of Vigilantes of Love, my fav 90s band. Blue Rodeo sound like Audible Sigh era Vigilantes... Uncle Tupelo or Peter Bruntnell are other references. 

I have only discovered this 2014 release now and it is a gorgeous little slice of seasonal alt country. It is mainly covers. You’d expect them to be drawn to Big Star (Jesus Christ), The Band (This Must be Christmas Night) and Merle Haggard (If We Make It Through December) but Paul Simon’s Getting Ready For Christmas Day off Simon’s 2011 record So Beautiful or So What is my very favourite here. In this setting the Christmasness of Simon's song comes to his fullest potential. 

They do a marvellous job on their fellow Country woman Joni Mitchell's River and another Canadian Gordon Lightfoot’s Song For A Winter’s Night is done much justice too. 

There are two tasty originals from Keelor and Cuddy and a carol O Come All ye Faithful.

As to be expected with all things Blue Rodeo, Merrie Christmas To You is a jaunty take on Christmas and all the better for that and that sublime pedal steel. 

CARA DILLON - UPON A WINTER'S NIGHT

My friend Dave Whitcroft tipped me off about Cara Dillon’s sublime Upon A Winter’s Night. I am very glad he did.

Today’s Christmas albums are pretty much Christ-less. Sorry Robbie Williams but Happy Birthday Jesus lacks awe, it lacks most everything to be honest, and it is only on the Deluxe edition of Christmas Present. The Gospel According to Robbie is all about Santa, snow, holly and shopping.

Cara Dillon came to her project with a very different raison d-etra. In an Irish News article she said:

“I’ve become obsessed now that we have children, that every time you step out the door at Christmas you are bombarded by Santa Baby and all those songs that don’t really mean anything and kids don’t really understand what Christmas is about. I feel really strongly about that… I wanted to make an album that had the magic and the mystery that seems to be missing nowadays. I wanted to create something that would take people to a different place, to give them goose-bumps in their arms to maybe help then reconnect with what Christmas is really about.”

A couple of things set off the authentic joy that turned into Upon A Winter’s Night. Firstly, a visit home and a night out with her sister at a GAA Club caused an invite to sing. It was near Christmas so she sang Oh Holy Night with her sister Mary. Pretty much as we hear it on the record.

Then Cara’s husband Sam Lakeman wrote the title track with their ten year old son. “Sam got his guitar out and started to write a song when Noah… What Noah added was the simplicity of a child. While an adult might have overcomplicated things, he’s at the age where he is doing Nativity plays and he added what he thought the shepherds or the Wise Men would say. So that was lovely.”

Lovely could describe the entire album but not a light and sentimental lovely. Yes, this will give you a warm feeling of Christmas but these songs are about a Divine love with a depth.

When you hear Cara Dillon sing in the context of Christmas it would be easy too imagine that it was something as pure as a voice like hers that the virgin Mary had to sing her Magnificat. Dillon does eight traditional carols, one in Irish (Rug Muire Mac do Dhia) all accompanied by a deft touch of folk instrumentation that few do better than the Lakeman family. There are three originals too.

Cara and Sam’s Catholic faith has brought more purpose and spiritual intention to this Christmas record. This is not just an artist with a Christmas album to gather some seasonal funds. Upon A Winter’s Night is a piece of art in itself.

CAMILLE O'SULLIVAN - CAMILLE SINGS CAVE LIVE

Irish singer, with a French mother, Camille O’Sullivan grabbed all of attention in a performance on Later… With Jools a few years ago. It wasn’t just me. The Telegraph chose her dramatic performance of Kirsty McColl’s In These Shoes as one of the best 25 Later… With Jules moments ever.

To be honest if O’ Sullivan had been only been about the theatre of In These Shoes she wouldn’t have gained traction. However, she was more than the bluster. Her albums Live@The Olympia and Changeling revealed a woman with the vocal abilities to cover a host of possibilities, Bowie, Radiohead, Tom Waits and even Snow Patrol. Cave was always heavy in the mix.

Camille brings all her drama to the piece. Her trademark raucousness to the sinister, Murder Ballad, Stagger Lee and brings it to a whisper in the haunting Skeleton Trees. 

Then there is the beauty of Into My Arms which comes across as that Van Morrison hybrid of romance with a Gospel tinge in the recognition of the divine. 

Ship Song and People Ain’t No Good begin with the barest layer of lush piano before gig off on one.

Don’t think for a moment that O’Sullivan is doing for cave what Jennifer Warnes did for Leonard Cohen with her Famous Blue raincoat album from 1987. Warnes gave Cohen a more accessible hue. Not so much with O’Sullivan. She is not bringing Nick Cave to a Mary Black audience!

Camille O’Sullivan takes on a ride and deep catalogue and bring her unique stamp on it (with her shoes!!!) without losing the reverence the original songs deserve. A more than worthwhile venture. I would love to have seen it live. 

COLDPLAY - EVERYDAY LIFE

Precariously traversing the contemporary crises across the world and bringing God and spirituality into the the mix. Welcome to my world…  and apparently the world of Coldplay too!

The fact that I have every Coldplay album ever released but have never reviewed any of them on Soul Surmise tells you that I like Coldplay but don’t love them! Well, that might be about to change! 

At midnight on Thursday I spend half an hour listening to snippets of the new album releases. Everyday Life sounded intriguing me but didn’t grab me immediately. My friend Chris Hunter texted Friday morning. He had played it through on his way to work and thought I’d need a listen too.

Thank you Chris. I did. He pointed me to BrokEn and When I Need a A Friend. Within minutes I had sent the former to Gary Burnett our Fitzroy blues guy and he had claimed it for the next time he is leading a Sunday service. We both thought When I Need a Friend was more for organ and Chris Blake!

That we had been thinking of Coldplay in worship liturgies suggests something different is happening on this record. It is.

Everyday Life is Coldplay’s White Album. No, not in most most amazing record ever made kind of comparison. Not even in its double album category. This album actually masquerades as a double record. It is all on one CD and is shorter than some previous Coldplay records. It is just that it is divided into Sunrise and Sunset as in all in the span of one day. Very Moody Blues!

No, Everyday Life is like the White Album in its lack of band cohesion and its scattering of genres all across it. Across these sixteen tracks (I am not even calling WOTW/POTP a song) we have gospel, blues, doo wop, brass, classical, folk and more spoken word than Revolution 9 ever dared get away with! There is some Coldplay in there too, Champion Of The World, their tribute to Frightened Rabbit’s late singer Scott Hutchinson, the one that will most easily fit the last live set list!

All of this makes for the most interesting Coldplay album, to my ears. There is tender piano and fragile guitar. There is Kemi Futi Afrobeat jazz and Gospel choirs. There are songs about racist violence, gun control or lack of it, Syrian refugees, parenting, of course love… and a whole lot of God.

Personally Orphans, Arabesque and Guns are the songs that deepen the Coldplay catalogue and grab my attention. However, Cry Cry Cry, Church, Daddy and Eko are equally interesting.

A few people have said to me, “I’ve been listening to the new Coldplay album and thinking that you must be all over that.” I hope that is a compliment to say that I quickly come to mind when music goes deeper but obviously with this one it is about the spiritual references.

They are slightly more than references. Everyday Life’s first lyric is in a song called Church and though that could be described as a love song with an interesting title it is not long until we have pure Gospel Blues on BrokEn:

 

And I know (Ooh-ooh)

That in the darkness I'm alright (I'm alright)

See there's no sun rising (Ooh-ooh)

But inside I'm free (Ooh-ooh)

'Cause the Lord will shine a light for me 

 

…and then the Church-like When I Need A Friend:

 

Holy, Holy

Dark defend

Shield me, show me

When I need a friend

 

Slowly, slowly

Violence, end

Love reign o'er me

When I need a friend

 

The entire album plays out at the end of the title track:

 

At first light, throw my arms out, open wide

Hallelujah, hallelujah

 

This all points to a Fitzroy Gospel According To for sure but hold your evangelical horses though if you are itching to declare Chris Martin as you latest Christian superstar. Martin grew up in a Christian home and has constantly returned to that well for lyrical inspiration. He has distanced himself from that evangelical branch of Christianity and now calls himself an all-theist. 

That is more what might be happening here. There are spiritual quotes all over this record but none from Bible or Koran. The message of the piece is a simple answer to the final questions mused on that title track; questions I am asking in sermons every Sunday: 

 

What in the world are we going to do?

Look at what everybody's going through

What kind of world do you want it to be?

Am I the future or the history?

 

This Coldplay record is calling for am answer that sees humanity as one big family. Arabesque reminds us that we all have the same blood. A John and Alice Coltrane quotation “May there be peace and love and perfection throughout all creation, through God” on the song Children of Adam remind us we all have the same origins.

Many will see Everyday Life’s Gospel as simplistic and sentimental but the solution to all nations getting on is not rocket science. Perhaps in the positivity of solution Coldplay are ignoring the need to deal with the selfish problem at the core of our humanity and racism but an album like Everyday Life can only be a good message to reverberate around our polarised world just now. 

Here’s a wee tip. Go to Youtube and watch the launch of the album, performed in its entirety live from Jordan. It is quite the experience and has me declaring that Everyday Life is the most “I want to go back and hear that again” Coldplay album that this soul has yet heard!

JEREMY CASELLA - SPIRIT

On a recent trip to the United States those most famous two words from Psalm 46 raised their heads again and again - “Be Still”.

It began in Delaware of Ohio when my friends Julie Morgan, BJ Allmon and Phillip Fox sang The Head and The Heart song Let’s Be Still. God invites the Psalmist to “be still” when it feels like the earth is giving way and the mountains are falling into the heart of the sea.

That evening and later in Taylor University and at Calvin University (I preferred College) I spoke of the times we are living in and how the call to “be still” helps us stop to remember who God is and then, as we do that, who we are in the light of who God is. “Be still”, I began to think, are prophetic words for our very uncertain times. 

At Calvin I met Gracie. Her stepdad happened to be songwriter Jeremy Casella. Gracie mentioned that Jeremy had a new record about to land. I reached out to Jeremy and he sent me the album. 

My soul seemed to jump out of my body when a few seconds into the very first songs Jeremy sings, “Be still…” 

Indeed, if in your discipline of being still you tend to seek music to slow you down and resource your reflecting then this Jeremy Casella record is made for such spiritual practice.

Spirit is a pastoral record. These songs are honest and vulnerable. There is brokenness and pain. There is a yearning for belonging and postures of resilience and hope. There is also the tangible love of a soul mate as a conduit of the love of God.

A look at Casella’s credits on other artist’s work give a clue to the template here. His collaborations with Phil Keaggy and Andrew Peterson give an accurate clue to the authoritative beauty of his guitar playing (Keaggy) and the poetic nature of the spiritual lyrics (Peterson). If Rich Mullins had lived long enough to collaborate with Matthew Perryman Jones (what a thought!) they might have come up with something like this.

The way that Casella reflects on the outside world and them injects it into the soul is very Mullins. I could see Spirit appear on Mullins’s Winds Of Heaven, Stuff Of Earth, Autumn In Kingston Springs on A Liturgy, Legacy and A Ragamuffin Band and Last Chance/Psalm 88 is Casella’s Hard To Get.  

With a beautifully added string quartet the sparseness of Casella's production means more. It is lush minimalism and carries on top words of comfort and a musical sat nav for us lost pilgrims to find our way home. 

So glad I bumped into Gracie.

JOE HENRY - THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WATER

I have been listening to Joe Henry since the early 90s. T-Bone Burnett produced him and The Jayhawks were his band on occasion. Two good introductions. 1993’s Kindness Of The World was a particular favourite.

In more recent times I got as excited about records Joe Henry produced as the ones T-Bone Burnett did. When my very favourite band Over The Rhine came into his sphere of genius, I was stoked.  

When Over The Rhine were in Fitzroy a couple of years ago I got talking to Linford about Henry. Joe had been in Belfast in his joint venture with Billy Bragg around the same time.

In the conversation Linford shared how he thought that pretty much everything Joe Henry spoke was literature. He told me that Joe still uses pen and paper and stamp and envelope. He sends letters! He signs them all Love and Revelation, Joe. On their next record Over the Rhine had a song called Love and Revelation!

Which brings us to The Gospel According To Water. Wow. Here’s a dark horse sneaking up along the rails to get itself in the frame for Album of the Year. 

The aforementioned Burnett once shared the secret of the first Counting Crows record. He said that most bands arrive with a demo that needs made into a fully fledged record. With August and Everything After, he went on, I turned the record they brought me back into a demo. 

The Gospel According To Water has that demo sound. Hanging on a lone guttural guitar sound, for the most part, the playing is measured, intentional and beautiful in the raw state of it. 

Upon this, Henry throws that literature that Linford said of his conversation. These are poetic songs with enough words articulately rhymed and depth of meaning for us to swim in for years to come. 

They are tough songs, written in a spurt while Henry was living with stage 4 prostate cancer *. You can imagine that they are as raw in emotion as that guttural sound they move upon. Joe himself says of them:

“Though they have all grown out of darkness, I don’t believe any of these songs themselves to be “dark” in nature, nor about the circumstance that prompted their discovery. In them, I hear the re-accessing of my imagination and its greater invitation; hear deep gratitude, and a compassion toward self that I don’t always possess; an optimism I did not know I’d allowed to flourish.”

Linford did say “literature”.

So if you are up for some personal discovery, some re-accessing of your imagination, a listening for deep gratitude, a compassion towards your self and some optimism to flourish then look no further. This is honest. This is vulnerable. This is pastoral. This is Love and Revelation.

 

*Joe is in remission - prognosis is encouraging.

SNOW PATROL - REWORKED

Ah! Snow Patrol Reworked. I have dreamt of such a thing since they did a show in the Royal Albert Hall in 2011 that rearranged their hits. I love that kind of thing and as my mates Iain and Miriam were drawn into the band for that gig I was all over that creative venture.

For their 25th Anniversary Snow Patrol went back to that project. Any other band would have released an ordinary Greatest Hits with perhaps that Royal Albert Hall concert as extra CD (the DVD was an extra with the deluxe edition of Fallen Empires) but no; nothing as lazy for Snow Patrol.

Following 2018’s Wildness, perhaps their best record, Reworked reveals a band in a rich vein of creativity. It seems that after 7 years of inactivity they haven’t been able to stop, starting these recordings in hotel rooms as they toured Wildness.

The songs are so reworked and so carefully sequenced that it is hard to know whether to put it in the “new albums” or “reissues” magazine reviews sections or Best Of The Year Awards categories.

It is a quality record. It is as if they had stripped out the inside of a house and remodelled the interior with a different ambience.

Reworked is gentler in spirit. You’re All I Have for is a fine example. Pumping out of the Eyes Open album as the lead off single in 2005 it is transformed in this incarnation to something so delicate.

Two things jump out from Reworked. 

Firstly, how good a songwriter that Gary Lightbody is. Take out the bluster and many a song can lose its soul or lack of it. These re-imagining reveal a robust core in their new tender skin. The lyrics are poetic. The melodies intoxicating and these haunting arrangements utterly beautiful.

Secondly, what a voice Gary Lightbody has; light and shade, gentle touch and earthy fulness. On the piano foundation of Take Back The City he is strong, rebuilding his wounded and wonderful home city. Then we have the falsetto of Empress and the fragility of Heal Me. 

Not that everything is easy with the gentleness. Run, with a distorted vocal treatment might be the most menacing moment. Who’d have thought! Yet, somehow Iain Archer doesn’t lose the anthemic chorus in the midst.

Everything sounds new but there are three actual new songs. I Think Of Home was originally part of a project that Lightbody did at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace. I have already described it as Lightbody’s In My Life. A celebration of his beloved Ireland - north, south, east and west!

Time Won’t Go Slowly, to the sound of a fairground carousel waltzer, ruminates on the relationship between love and time; a forty year old pondering mortality. It’s a suggestion that Lightbody’s best songwriting days are still to come.

Made Of Something Different Now is another such hint. Regretful heartache with the most hypnotic of melodies.

25 years in Snow Patrol are sounding like they are just hitting their stride. What they do in the first years of their next quarter century could be very creatively tasty indeed. Reworked is a band standing at the crossroads, looking back and forward, nowhere near the end of the road.

OVER THE RHINE - OHIO

Superlatives are left impotent as I attempt to describe Over the Rhine’s sixth album proper, tenth if we count various rare track compilations and a Christmas album. I found myself gasping throughout at the melodies, the poetry, the spiritual insight and the reflections and echoes of my inner most grappling with how God interacts with this beautiful yet fatally tainted human race and we with God. Then of course there is that voice. Karin Berquist has a voice that is seductive like no other, seducing your heart and your soul with a sound that is so otherworldly that you are not sure if your mortal ears can listen. Was it Julie Miller who stated that this was the voice that all of us would have in heaven; the women at least!

Musically this is as satisfied a sound as anything they have released before. Where the production on their first Back Porch release Films For Radio was chasing Dido and Sinead O’Connor into a little too modern pop this is ambient in the most gorgeously organic and acoustic of ways. Linford Detweiler who along with that angelic voice is the other half of Over The Rhine’s core has released two instrumental piano albums and here for maybe the first time the piano drives the entire thing way forward in the mix and navigated sweetly by a lot of pedal steel. That piano and that voice are a match made in heaven “a beautiful piece of heartache” as Latter Days on Good Dog Bad Dog suggests; a chemistry that explodes gently in aural ecstasy. As Over The Rhine should now be everything else serves the two main protagonists.

The songs? Well What I’ll Remember Most, Jesus In New Orleans, Lifelong Fling, Long Lost Brother and Remind Us are simply the best songs these guys have ever written. People will say that a double album is a little ambitious in the days when you can easily squeeze 75 minutes onto a single disc and though you could probably pick out the thirteen tracks that would have made the single record cut you would not have wanted to have missed the trippy How Long Have You Been Stoned, the Gram Parsons country rock of Show Me or the Gospel Choir of the hidden track Idea #21 for anything. In fact a triple CD would have been justified. Bring it on!

As writers Linford and Karin have never been so up front about their faith. Jesus In New Orleans probably typifies their approach. The last place that you expect to find Jesus is where he is and just maybe that is exactly where we should have been looking all along. There is drink and doubt and angels being wrestled and there is war and rumours of war and death; a whole lot of death. These guys were going through the pain of personal sorrow at the same time as America was in national mourning around September 2001. It seems that it has brought their writing face to face with mortality but also the life they have lived, are living and that in itself directs them to the destinations they need to set out for while they understand that eventually it will be home that they return to; in their case Ohio!

In the earth of their native state Over The Rhine have made their ordinary every day world extraordinary. They have found a severe mercy in the midst of their personal as well as humanity’s deepest darkness. They have delved deep to find hope in the tragedies our darkness create. They have found a place of joy in the midst of the certain-to-come-our-way tears. They have used all their wrestling to weave poetry and music into a tapestry of utterly astonishing beauty. Ohio, be proud.

Superlatives are left impotent as I attempt to describe Over the Rhine’s sixth album proper, tenth if we count various rare track compilations and a Christmas album. I found myself gasping throughout at the melodies, the poetry, the spiritual insight and the reflections and echoes of my inner most grappling with how God interacts with this beautiful yet fatally tainted human race and we with God. Then of course there is that voice. Karin Berquist has a voice that is seductive like no other, seducing your heart and your soul with a sound that is so otherworldly that you are not sure if your mortal ears can listen. Was it Julie Miller who stated that this was the voice that all of us would have in heaven; the women at least!

Musically this is as satisfied a sound as anything they have released before. Where the production on their first Back Porch release Films For Radio was chasing Dido and Sinead O’Connor into a little too modern pop this is ambient in the most gorgeously organic and acoustic of ways. Linford Detweiler who along with that angelic voice is the other half of Over The Rhine’s core has released two instrumental piano albums and here for maybe the first time the piano drives the entire thing way forward in the mix and navigated sweetly by a lot of pedal steel. That piano and that voice are a match made in heaven “a beautiful piece of heartache” as Latter Days on Good Dog Bad Dog suggests; a chemistry that explodes gently in aural ecstasy. As Over The Rhine should now be everything else serves the two main protagonists.

The songs? Well What I’ll Remember Most, Jesus In New Orleans, Lifelong Fling, Long Lost Brother and Remind Us are simply the best songs these guys have ever written. People will say that a double album is a little ambitious in the days when you can easily squeeze 75 minutes onto a single disc and though you could probably pick out the thirteen tracks that would have made the single record cut you would not have wanted to have missed the trippy How Long Have You Been Stoned, the Gram Parsons country rock of Show Me or the Gospel Choir of the hidden track Idea #21 for anything. In fact a triple CD would have been justified. Bring it on!

As writers Linford and Karin have never been so up front about their faith. Jesus In New Orleans probably typifies their approach. The last place that you expect to find Jesus is where he is and just maybe that is exactly where we should have been looking all along. There is drink and doubt and angels being wrestled and there is war and rumours of war and death; a whole lot of death. These guys were going through the pain of personal sorrow at the same time as America was in national mourning around September 2001. It seems that it has brought their writing face to face with mortality but also the life they have lived, are living and that in itself directs them to the destinations they need to set out for while they understand that eventually it will be home that they return to; in their case Ohio!

In the earth of their native state Over The Rhine have made their ordinary every day world extraordinary. They have found a severe mercy in the midst of their personal as well as humanity’s deepest darkness. They have delved deep to find hope in the tragedies our darkness create. They have found a place of joy in the midst of the certain-to-come-our-way tears. They have used all their wrestling to weave poetry and music into a tapestry of utterly astonishing beauty. Ohio, be proud.