Goldmund, Loney Dear and Michael Yonkers

I did end up reviewing that Goldmund album, All Will Prosper, using some of the same language that I first posted here but, you know, longer.

Goldmund
All Will Prosper
(Western Vinyl)


Composer Keith Kenniff recorded this lovely collection of traditional songs over several years, arranging the melodies simply for piano and guitar, and recording them in an exceptionally clear, unadorned way that nonetheless suggests memory, loss and nostalgia. Many of these mostly Civil War-era songs are very familiar. We are, after all, talking about standards like "Dixie" and "Shenandoah", and ubiquitous spirituals like "Amazing Grace." Yet all have a glow of otherworldliness, of spectral weightless-ness, as if they were the memory of these songs, packed away in dusty attics and captured in faded daguerreotypes, and not the song themselves.

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Also, this ran a long time ago in the Blurt fall print issue, but it's online now, my review of Loney, Dear's Hall Music

Loney, Dear
Hall Music
(Polyvinyl)


Emil Svanangen has often blown his wistful little pop songs out to grand proportions, whether surrounding them with a jubilant indie chorus, as on Loney, Noir, lacing them with pounding drums on Dear John or, this time out, enlisting classical instruments. Here, on a record inspired by his year-long collaboration with Swedish chamber music orchestras, Svanangen's wavery voice flickers in and out of thickets of brass, plays tag with flights of xylophone and emerges, bruised and pining, from fog-bound forests of synthesizer. A broader palette of instruments, however, seems only to accentuate the personal nature of Svanangen's work.

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And finally, my friend Michael alerted me to a new documentary about one of my very favorite rock and roll people, Michael Yonkers, who, you may remember, I interviewed for Dusted a few years ago. Here's the clip that Michael sent me:



Have a nice rest of your weekend then. We're going to go to the Y later to work out and try to catch a little of one of those football games, I think Saints/Niners. Sucks not having TV this time of year.

Goldmund's now that's what I call music: 1864-style

Goldmund's All Will Prosper is a little out of the ordinary, but gorgeous. The album, by electronic composer Kenneth Keniff, collects 15 mostly-Civil War-era folk songs, reconceived for spectral piano and guitar, in the simplest possible, most emotionally evocative way. There is something, for instance, about the way that the piano notes reverberate that conveys memory and loss. these are not exactly faithful renditions of living melodies, but rather their ghosts, pared down almost to transparency and -- even the lively ones -- infinitely sad.

Western Vinyl has decided to give away one of the most familiar tunes on the album, "Amazing Grace" but the ones that give me the chills are the two "Johnny" battle songs..."Johnny has gone for a soldier" and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again."

I've always loved "Shenandoah," too. (I used to have a lot of these songs in a collection of american songs that I learned how to play the piano from.)

I asked about reviewing this at Blurt, but I don't know if I'll get it.