by Over The Rhine
Back Porch Records
www.overtherhine.com
OTRhine@aol.com
Listening to this CD several times has made me much less bitchy about it; I’d say the major problems on this quiet pop album are occasional self absorption in its own musical angst, and melodies that could use just a little more tweaking, or just get too durned repetitive.
Udder than that, this has some really beautiful stuff. Over The Rhine, who’ve done a lot of touring with the Cowboy Junkies, is a foursome of Karin Bergquist, Ric Hordinski, Brian Kelley, and Linford Detweiler, with Bergquist and Detweiler doing most of the writing. Lead singer Bergquist parlays a good voice that draws us in with the first breath, sort of in the Jewel/Paula Cole category; that modern singing style where if you don’t watch it you sound exceptionally helpless.
Karen sings with a lot of pathos, and when she’s got the right tune on her lips, you can really hear the passion and the feeling. On the other hand, if the song isn’t deserving of such exquisite treatment, it just gets noxious. In a couple songs, she sounds forced. Fortunately there’s not a lot of that -- and as you listen, words, phrases, melodic hooks stick in your mind, each lyric profound in its own right, but sometimes hard to make sense of when you actually read the lyrics of as a whole.
Probably the best song of the bunch is the opener, "Latter Days," which gets its atmosphere from some very simple piano beating out a steady build of chords underneath the singer, leading you on to the next line of the verse. It sets the tone for the whole album in the first two lines.
What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be Lord knows we’ve learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
"Willoughby," written by Hordinski, is instrumental, sounds down home folksy with a bit of country thrown in. You can tell the difference in the style. Also, listen to the flute (mellotron, perhaps?) threading its way through the sneaky rhythms of "Faithfully Dangerous."
"It’s Never Quite What It Seems," has one of those memorable melodies that sounds comfortingly familiar, then goes off on its own tangent, which becomes familiar after a few hearings.
The dying light makes it hard to tell wrong from right And it’s never quite what it seems.
Anyway, I like this one. It makes you pay attention without realizing it. It makes you think, and you can tell that they’ve been doing some thinking as well.
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