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Get over it.Personally, I find her much less patronizing and obnoxious than most revivalists, but even if she hadn't *adopted* the neo-Appalachian thing, I do like a lot of her songwriting, and I like her musical arrangements, which aren't overproduced but also aren't trying too hard to be "twangy." Yeah, Gillian Welch is a pop-folk-revivalist.
If you like Alison Krauss or Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch is a sure-fire hit. "I Want To Sing That Rock & Roll," is perhaps the happiest of the bunch.the rest have mournful (but not depressing) lyrics and sound. If longevity is a measure of an album's appeal, then the fact that this is still one of my favorites, SEVEN years after I purchased it surely says something. "Time" is a beautiful, poetic, and soothing album.
I love it, and dearly, precisely because of its unique, hypnotic tone and pacing. I don't need to ferret out every arcane reference in the lyrics, or to "get the message," I simply adore this stuff. I'm still profoundly affected by it after nearly five years' owning the disc.
Other selections leave one with a sense of the death of the real USA. It's a new kind of music. The vocal harmonies and string playing are innovative, always serving the mood.
This album is just.transcendent. A pure, resigned sadness emanates from somewhere inside most of these haunting songs; never gratuitous, but so connected to real life in its truth-telling. Let it happen to you.
Truly enough, Gillian Welch's other albums feature what might be labeled a greater "variety" of song styles, and they deserve repeated listening as well, but "Time (the Revelator)" stands alone. Altcountry it isn't, and this is key; Welch and her facile, idiosyncratic guitarist David Rawlings succeed in the creation of an economical yet expansive acoustic sound-world, at once spare and sophisticated, and very beautiful.
Gillian & David brought me home. Most of which I couldn't find after being away 20 years, but. Ted The Fiddler I first heard this music on a tiny boom box on John Hartford's Porch just after they had recorded some of it in an all night session in Studio B. I was curled up in a hard wooden chair, and very hung over from a night of drinking in my old haunts.
"don't let another day pass without listening to this." Finding records like this is the whole reason I listen to music in the first place.Sunset on a decrepit back porch with a glass of whiskey. In a lifetime of listening to music, in the wake of thousands and thousands of albums sat with, there are perhaps 50 that are so self-assured, so complete, and so beautifully executed that there is nothing to say other than.
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