Indeed, the most striking thing about Soul Journey is its summeriness. At this stage in her career, Welch has, it seems, largely moved beyond the relatively unadorned bluegrassy and trad-folk flavour of her earlier recordings, now mining a perhaps richer and certainly broader seam of rootsy americana, in terms of both instrumental palette and general ethos — I fancy that Gram’s old term ‘cosmic american music’ ain’t a mile away from what’s going on here.
The sound isn’t as old-timey as on any of Welch’s previous, uniformly great albums, 1996’s Revival, 1998’s Hell Among The Yearlings and 2001’s Time (The Revelator) but it’s equally warm and dusty-feeling — and equally great. There’s an end-of-day languor to it all — a sense of the interstices between sunshine and shadow, of hazy still afternoons flowing into breeze-touched evenings, of drift and ebb and flow, and of the necessary relationship between transience and permanency. Music that exists in the intersections of country, folk and more popular stylings today is, of its nature, in a sense suspended between past and present — informed by and tied to what has come before it (not least the suffering and hardship out of which ‘mountain’ music was born) — and Welch seems to have achieved some kind of contingently perfect synthesis out of this ongoing process of retrieval and renewal…it’s somehow out of time.
What does this mean ‘on the ground’ of Soul Journey, as it were? Well, it means acoustic guitar, dobro, fiddle, unobtrusive drums, and sometimes bass and (I think) even organ, and all melded into something which feels old and new all at once. And then, of course, there’s Welch’s wonderful yawn (in the best possible way) of a voice. A lot of the warmth of this music comes directly from that voice — down to earth and forthright, and yet somehow expressive and delicate, too. A voice which is crystalline, not in a perfect Alison Krauss kind of way (something which I say without meaning any disparagement of Krauss’s lovely and amazing voice!), but instead has echoes of history and life woven in with its clarity…if that latter’s voice is silvery, then perhaps Welch’s is golden.
…
“Wrecking Ball” in particular really is something else; preceded by the wistful prettiness of “One Little Song” and “I Made A Lovers Prayer”, it picks the pace up a bit, and fills out those implied spaces to create a fuller sound than anywhere previously on the album, swinging Soul Journey home on the back of a scything fiddle, prominent guitars, Welch’s voice, and a gorgeous melody…it brings my heart into my throat nearly every time. In a way, it — and the album as a whole — does, as Welch sings, show us colours we’d never seen, but it’s the kind of showing that brings with it the realisation that, after all, those colours were always already there.
- 6/10/05
