I'm relatively new to Gillian Welch and her music. I purchased Revival on sale and, though I recognized and appreciated its extraordinary craftsmanship, I never really connected to that recording. After watching Welch and Rawlings' excellent performance in the concert film Down from the Mountain, I decided to give them a second chance and purchased Time (The Revelator), which has since become one of my favorite and most-played albums. I later decided to purchase the rest of her catalog, including this release, which has been so good that I have yet to give Hell Among the Yearlings or Soul Journey more than a cursory listen.
The first half of this album is comprised entirely of some of the absolute best songs I have ever heard in my (admittedly limited) musical experience. "Scarlet Town" is a beautifully bitter tune that perfectly sets the stage for the rest of the album. Following that is "Dark Turn of Mind", which sounds a bit like a rootsified Patsy Cline song with infinitely more pathos. Then there are the first two "The Way" songs: "The Way it Goes" and "The Way it Will Be", the former being an elegantly simplistic uptempo tale bemoaning good friends gone bad (and eventually dead), while the latter is a hazy, downbeat number about placing the blame in a thoroughly broken relationship. The first half wraps up with the gorgeous "Tennessee", which skillfully (and narrowly) skirts an overdose of country music tropes about Heaven and whiskey and beautifully delivers a story of lust, sin, and a faint hope for redemption.
Side B is somewhat less impressive. "Down Along the Dixie Line" is lovely, but packs little emotional punch, and when Gillian sings that she "spent her childhood walking the wildwood" and "was so happy with mama and pappy," it feels more than a little calculated and constructed. The next track, the stomping, harmonica-filled "Six White Horses" initially feels tremendously out of place, but may very well grow on you after a few listens. Next is "Hard Times", which is achingly beautiful and by far my favorite track on the CD; it's a song about hardship that uses the bond between a farmer and one of his animals as a framing device, and it packs both a fantastic chorus and an immensely powerful ending. The penultimate track "Silver Dagger", which is actually an original composition rather than the traditional song, feels almost as out of place as "Six White Horses", but is still a good, well-constructed murder ballad with solid lyrics and a melody eerily reminiscent of "You Are My Sunshine". "The Way the Whole Thing Ends" closes the album beautifully; it pulls off sharp wit and a sleepy mood simultaneously.
The musicianship is excellent, the album never once feels overproduced, and the lyricism throughout is stunningly good, to the point where I would actually consider it a "spoiler" if I examined too many of the best bits in this review. The entire album carries the all-but-apocalyptic bleakness of the darkest songs on Revelator; this is not happy fare by any means. Virtually every song ends in death, heartache, and sorrow, with only faint hope remaining. It's an album that truly lives up to its title; these songs each describe harrowing experiences, and reaping the benefits of these hardships provides a rich harvest.
It may be a bit top-heavy on truly excellent material, but The Harrow & the Harvest still stands as one of the best albums in my collection, and has displaced Polly Jean Harvey's Let England Shake as my favorite album of 2011 thus far. Five of five stars.
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