Welcome back to the CD Odyssey! This next review shows that any topic can be interesting if the art depicting it is good enough.
Disc 1452 is…. Cusp
Artist: Alela Diane
Year of Release: 2018
What’s up with the Cover? It’s Alela Diane, looking majestically to the right. Diane is not royalty that I know of, but that’s the kind of profile that would look good on a coin.
How I Came To Know It: I was already a fan, so I checked this record out. It didn’t grab me on my first listen, so I didn’t bother buying it. A year later, I was down in Oregon and found a copy in a record store there. On a whim, I decided to buy it anyway.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Alela Diane albums. I like them all, but competition is fierce, and “Cusp” comes in at #3. And this being the last of Alela Diane’s albums in my collection (for now) here is a recap:.
- To Be Still: 5 stars (reviewed at Disc 1000)
- Alela Diane & Wild Divine: 4 stars (reviewed
at Disc 1326)
- Cusp: 4 stars (reviewed right here)
Alela Diane would like you to know that she had a baby. Ordinarily, this is not my favourite topic (in fact, “babies” is probably my all-time least favourite topic). But when you can sing and write songs as well as Alela Diane, you get a pass.
Diane is a folk singer with one of those voices that dives right down into your soul. Hearing her is akin to finding yourself surrounded by elves in Lothlorien. It is magical and ethereal, yet so grounded in natural grace you feel calm and safe.
Her songs have a light lilt, like a birdsong, that makes you want to drift away on the wind. It is so pretty you want to tra-la-la along with her, but if you dare to try, you’ll quickly find the melodies only seem free and easy when she sings them. You can’t tell listening to Alela, but these songs are hard as hell to sing. She climbs up into a falsetto, then swoops down into chest voice then finds some middle ground before lifting off again. It’s powerful and fragile in equal measure; simultaneously the oak tree standing stolid in a storm, and a single leaf from that same tree, dancing in the wind.
Fortunately, you don’t have to listen to just anything, because “Cusp” is chock-full of Diane’s first-rate songwriting. They aren’t typical folk songs, mixing in pop progressions and folk traditions into something that catches your ear from the first notes, and then flits along with meandering purpose. There are times when I wished the melodies were more straightforward, but that was just me cranky that my broken old voice couldn’t keep up.
Diane had a child shortly before she released this album (her second) and as I alluded earlier, she wraps motherhood around every experience she has. “So Tired” captures the difficulty of balancing motherhood and touring, and “Never Easy” has Diane seeing her own mother in a better light, as she examines the mother-daughter relationship from the other side of the ledger. The best line in that song…
“Oh, my mama
I understand now
That you’ve always loved me more”
…leaves the “more” hang at the end of the line, trailing into the trill of piano and a wordlessly beautiful falsetto note. More than what? it seems to ask, letting that silence hang as the listener fills in the missing words, “more than anything.”
When she does use her words, they are too good effect. On “Song for Sandy” she describes her character, bereft of child, as “her heart hung heavy as a noose from a beam.” On “Ether & Wood” she draws you through a scene replete with sights, scents and nostalgia:
“I walked through the house we built
Saw the life I left behind
Ivory paint cracked and peeled on the walls
The hydrangea and red rose
Strangled by vines
I don’t live here anymore.”
“Ether & Wood” is the album’s best song, its melody breathing like the waters lapping at the edge of lake, dreamily evoking old houses, and the ghostly memories that haunt them. Even here Alela Diane takes it back to pregnancy, and the loss of self in the experience. As a devoted follower of the adage “cats not kids”, I wanted this to bother me. I even half-heartedly resolved to knock the album down a star.
Only I couldn’t do it. The songs are just too damned good. All that imagery of motherhood and pregnancy are so artfully thread through each tune, I found my complaints dying on my lips, as I swayed to the mysterious music of the elves. Pregnant ones to be sure, but elves all the same.
Best tracks: Threshold, Moves Us Blind, Song for Sandy, Ether & Wood, Wild Ceaseless Song
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