Hidden Highways
Old Hearts Reborn

The World began with a waltz... whispered Carol Anne

But Tim exclaimed - I don't know how to dance the waltz

I don't even know the tale of the dancing leaves

how can I generate all that stardust -

Don't worry, replied Carol Anne

the new moon is rising, squint your eyelids and keep the pace

“The world began with a waltz / This is how it will end”

Between arid lands and archipelagos of islands, which were becoming increasingly imposing continents, the music was still floating in search of a new horizon in which to mold, in new combinations, those ever-mother elements; earth and sea.

Even among those hidden and inscrutable highways and tomorrow if madness prevails, in the new underground highways, music will still be the queen of hearts.

Because music is fundamentally noble and nomadic.

Among what remains of that American dream, amongst those suburban utopias, in that microcosm printed between the lacquered white picket fence, the geometric green lawn, and the backyard.

May it shine like a comet from this one-shot of this intimate and eccentric Irish duo.

“The Hidden Highways”, probably only one album to their name, “Old Hearts Reborn”, with the ghostly participation of Carol Anne McGowan and Tim V. Smith, heralds of a Jurassic folk with very robust roots but branches that delightfully aim for the most stormy peaks. All spiced with the certainty of knowing the reasons for the beginning and the end of the world and that brazen calm able to sow panic among bureaucrats of the entire world, anxiety can ultimately also become a splendid emotion when one clears the visual field from all those cumbersome ghosts.

And certainly, Carol Anne had already shown signs of venerable deviancy, with that debut in the mesmerizing mini-album “Songs from the Cellar”, recorded in that ancient secular cellar in the Rhineland, only microphone and voice, with that Directory that later became Brand with friend Tim; less quality but more intensity, that minimal retro-melancholy so dear to the never forgotten "Sparklehorse" of Vivadixie.

In listening to this album and in the description of the lyrics, how can one not mention Mark, that slender fragility that makes you feel so light and free to soar into the stratosphere, that vision of the world that over time creates all those complicated vertigos...

And in the writing of the late Linkous, I find many, many common traits, like two strokes of a pen on a white panel that come together and get lost, that constant hope of eternalizing the moment, crystallizing that melancholy to tame it and make it palatable, that semi-divine aspiration to seduce and trick the reality, to ideally subtract it from its natural and physiological mental, physical and spiritual decay.

The fragility of the ballads and the characters of the songs of “Old Hearts Reborn” is disarming, the only remedy not to shatter the glassware remains that acute subtraction, that ingenious stratagem of anchoring time in the depths of that ancient emotion, allowing only memories to create that fictitious aura of movement, ultimately seeking that ray of hope and that cryptic redemption and ultimate source of salvation. In that Folk creation of the world, between century-old traditions and Irish folk songs, our heroes breathe the purity of the heliosphere without filters, fluttering in an atemporal space, where that essence unknown to the Western world dominates, that century-old wisdom handed down by the oracles of Dana.

That state of anguish to manage by setting aside that antagonist temptation, that frontal clash, but which must ultimately lead to that sedimentation of reflections, to the endorsement of that subdued defeat aiming at the constellation of the moment.

Carol Anne's style reminds me much of that timeless sinuosity of another great artist, Sybile Baier, although Baier gave me precisely the impression of being even less materialistic, even more astral and even in the most listless listening, in that fantastic album, at the beginning, I'm always led to associate an end... I don't know why.

Who do we have before us, then?

Tim and Carol Anne, certainly, two soft Irish artists, lost and liquid within a timeless folk bubble, which dangles and swings among snowy ballads, the artistic references would also be many but the duo has a proverbial calm and a distance, from everything, truly singular.

From the first notes the timer starts backward and there is that foreign sensation of being unconsciously wrapped within the vacuum of a Gaelic amphora; it opens delicately with “Empire of Old”, a journey at sunset that even from the title refers to that invisible guiding crack in that undergrowth of viola, steel guitar, and harmonica, towards that seminal phantasmagoria in two, with that timbre of Carol Anne's voice present but always out of time, which seems to come from that old record player forgotten in the attic.

“The World Began With A Waltz” should be the ideal overture, the snap of the fingers that arrests the beat of time, resets all tweets and opens with velvet towards that folk d’antan. Zero effects and reverbs, essential aesthetics in a sound that has vocal ability as a main component, but that temperature and warmth are from other worlds.

“The Velvet Voices” is stunning in its flat calmness; it is difficult to challenge that peak of the original T. Van Zandt version, but the adaptation with the rest of the album has remarkable naturalness, that bare essentiality and that arrangement temporarily stolen from pop brings the track to that magical level of work.

Earth and Sea.

“The world began with a waltz / This is how it will end”