Emmylou Harris

Wrecking Ball

Essential

Review Score:

(10/10)
Not many modern country legends have traveled throughtheir careers with the wherewithal, grace and vision of Emmylou Harris. More than twenty years after helping Gram Parsons reinvent country with so-called "Cosmic American music," Harris is still tinkering with the genre's songwriting conventions and the sounds she uses to illustrate the words she sings. Enter Daniel Lanois: erstwhile protege of Brian Eno, producer to U2, Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson, and a visionary artist in his own right who mixes the Louisiana music of his Acadian ancestry with the ambient settings of his modernist mentor. On WRECKING BALL, he is the perfect foil for Harris' spiritual explorations, casting her in a light that has little in common with Nashville's neon glow.

Lanois' reverb-soaked recording technique and odd instrumentation decisions give WRECKING BALL its aura, wrapping the album in a mystical veil. They also free Harris to dive deeper into the lyrical ideas of the songs, and emerge with clear spiritual conveyances. Steve Earle's "Goodbye" is a rhythmically sprawling reopening of an old wound, as Earle himself sits in on the proceedings, gently fingerpicking the melody in front of Lanois' electric-guitar washes. "Deeper Well" is Harris and Lanois' idiosyncratic take on gospel bluegrass--U2's Larry Mullen, Jr. pounds a rolling north African beat over a gray din, while acoustic guitars, piano progressions and irreverent vocal snippets echo around Harris' search for "a holier grail."

WRECKING BALL's move away from traditional foundations is most apparent in a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love." Instead of taking a storyteller's approach, Harris and Lanois treat the song as a declaration--a duet between their voices and multiple guitar tracks, with Mullen adding a faint rhythm. The singers give themselves over to the upliftment and blind trust the lyrics describe, as the prickly distortions and loops that accompany them supply the reality check of their drab modern surroundings.

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