Rating: 5/5
Review:
A fine, important album
This is a very powerful album from the great Mary
Gauthier. The material here was written
in collaboration with US military veterans and the result is something rather
special in its way.
Gauthier has always been a remarkable songwriter; such
intimate work with people whose real experience she wants to express means that
the songs here are some of her most raw and heartfelt – which, after albums
like The Foundling and Trouble & Love is really saying something. She captures here the internal experiences of
war, but also of returning to the psychological challenge and sometimes
devastation of the aftermath. We get a
variety of experience and a fine collection of songs; for me, two of the most
striking are Brothers and Iraq,
which deal with the experience of women soldiers among a predominantly male
cohort. They are both unsettling and
brilliant, I think, and the rest of the album is in the same class.
Musically, this is unmistakeably Mary Gauthier, with her
trademark straightforward, powerful tunes.
(The opener, Soldiering On, carries more than an echo of both Blood Is
Blood and Trouble & Love, but that's fine by me.) The lyrics don't always reach her normal
exceptional standard because they come from other, less experienced sources,
but in the context that doesn’t matter one bit to me. In Morphine 1-2, for example, lines like
"She was a fearless pilot with a heart of gold," aren't great
lyric-writing, but the song is nonetheless moving and powerful – possibly more
so because some slightly inexpert phrases remind us that it comes from a heart
which has genuinely felt these things.
Rifles & Rosary Beads isn't an easy, relaxing listen,
but it's a really rewarding one. It's
Mary Gauthier at her best, doing something she truly believes in, working with
people whose stories she wants to help them express. It's a very fine (and important) album which
I can recommend very warmly.
(For another very fine album on this theme I would also
strongly recommend War Surplus by Becky Warren, one of my favourite albums of
2017:
)
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