Album Review: Kris Delmhorst, ‘Ghosts in the Garden’
On her new album, Ghosts in the Garden, New England-based singer and songwriter Kris Delmhorst passes through the permeable borders of the physical and the spiritual, exploring in haunting vocals the ethereal and transitory character of life and the shadowy world that inhabits the gardens and seasons of our lives. Like the poems of Keats, Shelley, and Emily Dickinson, Delmhorst’s songs flourish as odes to impermanence and memory.
The album opens with the swirling instrumental and vocal echoes of “Summer’s Growing Old,” a psychedelic folk mantra to the transience of time and place. The sparkling guitars of the minor chord lament “Wolves” provide a tingling thematic line that evokes the boundary between age and youth, life and death. In the final line of the song, Delmhorst slyly asks us about the way we live and the way we might embrace death: “do you really love the story, if you don’t love the end?” The mournful pedal steel on the title track lays the foundation for Delmhorst’s spiraling, crystalline vocals as she portrays vividly the spectrality of human life: “feel the edges disappear/you can fall right into the night.” Rachel Baiman joins Delmhorst on vocals on the propulsive “Won’t Be Long” as it rocks down the highway of human desire and disappointment and the ambiguity of love. Bright notes from a Farfisa organ and electric guitars create the shimmering jazz folk of “Not the Only One,” an atmospheric meditation on love and loss. The loping country folk of “Age of Innocence,” featuring Ana Egge’s and Delmhorst’s Everly Brothers-like harmonies, captures the dewiness of an unspoiled paradise of love and the parched tedium that accompanies knowing too much about love and loss. The album closes with the airy and dreamy “Something to Show,” which conveys the flickering states between sleep and wakefulness.
Ghosts in the Garden displays Delmhorst’s lyrical brilliance and her ability to call forth the spirits that dwell just behind the joys and sorrows of our lives.
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More information about Ghosts In the Garden is available HERE
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