•
Rating:
She steps onto the stage nonchalantly, on the languid curve of a slide, and it becomes immediately clear that this is not an everyday occurrence.
Mary Gauthier has an intense voice, rough and direct, but capable of unexpected sweetness and languor, a voice that seems to condense the taste of the years into its tone: their long shadows as well as the flashes of intensity that sometimes illuminate them. Her new album, the fifth, enters the fray with dry determination, thanks in part to the masterful production of a man we've come to appreciate for a long time, that Joe Henry, skilled in scars, able to make sounds shine even when they move through smoke and vapors.
The turbulent biography, almost a paradigm of that "maledetta" iconography so beloved by press offices and a certain audience, is not expressed in dramatic outburst but is distilled into ten songs that confirm a compositional maturity already declared by the previous "Mercy Now", which many consider her masterpiece. But here, in the infinite and sometimes imperceptible shades of gray, rather than in the dichotomy between blacks and whites, in the uncertain area between daylight and darkness, we observe the slow, inexorable progression, the powerful simplicity of the images projected by her words. Propelled by essential and precious sounds that surround the voice, towards an undefined point in our own history, between daylight and dark.
Yes, it's true, these poor lines are not sufficient. Listen to her here.
Album rating: 3.5/4
Loading comments slowly
