Album Review: Mary Gauthier, ‘Reckoning’
Mary Gauthier excels at creating soundscapes, little cinematic scenes in which haunting music evokes a human heart bereft of hope and love or in which propulsive rhythms elevate the human longing to be transported above the fray of clashing emotions. The spare quality of the songs on ‘Reckoning,‘ her first album since 2018’s ‘Rifles & Rosary Beads,’ plumb the depths our losses as well as the ways we overcome them with anticipation and action, both in our personal and in our political relationships.
On the album’s opening track, “Alcohol and Adderall,” Gauthier’s vibrant down strums ricochet through the atmosphere as they mimic the hollowness of a girl staring out her window and the familiar loneliness that addiction to alcohol and drugs begets. Despite acknowledging the addict’s plunge into the shadows and the darkness of night, the song bristles with prosaic frankness about the destiny that an addict can’t outrun.
Written with Lori McKenna, the moving “Heaven,” with its circling guitar picking and shimmering harmonies, paints an affectionately drawn portrait of aging, death, and enduring faith, hope, and love. Gauthier’s brisk strumming drives “Judgment Day” with a snare-like rhythm that accompanies the song’s subject—a young bishop—onto the front lines of the struggle for love and justice in a world where religious people often pervert Jesus’ message of love for others. This song stands with Amy Ray’s “Jesus Was a Walking Man” as protest songs that should be on the lips of all those demonstrating for a more just world.
The propulsive title track, co-written with Aaron Lee Tasjan, spirals higher and higher into the sonic stratosphere as this anthem rings in the hope of a better day.
The shimmering and airy “Soldier of Fortune,” written with Eliza Gilkyson, belies its dark subject: those individuals eager to “follow orders”—whether it’s crucifying Jesus or shooting Rene Good in cold-blood on a Minneapolis street—“doing it for the money and laughs.”
A gorgeous story song, “Story Times,” written with Vince Gill, narrates the memoir of a Pullman Porter who in his travels and in his rest has indeed seen “some times” of racial injustice as well as the election of the nation’s first Black president. The album closes with “I Thought I Heard a Train,” a moving gospel-inflected song written by the late Tom Mason. Its refrain pulls hope from the darkness and loss of the verses (“Like the sweet sound of salvation come to carry me away”).
‘Reckoning’ itself is indeed a “sweet sound of salvation,” carrying us through the hollows of our souls and the hopelessness in our hearts through the darkness and into the glimmers of shining love and hope where reckoning and restoration may occur.
You may cquire the album here.
