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She has a great voice and has a lot of talent. This CD was very dull. Saw her at the Garrison Keller show recently in Tucson AZ. But she needs to be in a real band with some drums and some electric guitars. Sorry. I liked her music but this CD was very much a downer. Too slow for me and way too ballady.
The combination of Gillian's clear American bluegrass/folk voice underpinned by David's exquisitely judged harmonies makes for blissful listening. and the result is perfect. But it's not just the performances, the songs are beautiful, and some, like Dear Someone and Elvis Presley Blues are latecoming folk/blues classics.Recommended without reservation. What you have here is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings writing and performing their compositions. So yes, basically it's Gillian's voice and guitar backed by David's voice and guitar.
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.
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