Album Review: Rhiannon Giddens, ‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers’
In this complicated and trying era, where hopelessness and despair wash over us like a tsunami and where the jagged shards of cruel and spiteful words cut deeply and divide communities, Rhiannon Giddens’ seventh studio album, ‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers,’ testifies to the redemptive power of hope and to its fragility.
Co-produced by Giddens and her long-time musical collaborator and writing partner Dirk Powell, the album was recorded live and engineered and mixed at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Combining several originals with versions of traditional folk or old time songs, Giddens and her musical collaborators deliver a shining beacon of hope in our dark time.
The album’s first track, “Angel Fire Rise,” opens sparely with Giddens’ minstrel banjo notes twining around the tendrils of Powell’s fiddling, laying the foundations for Giddens’ vocals that echo the individual notes of the music. The musicians provide the song’s percussive rhythms with foot stomping as spiraling harmony vocals call and respond to Giddens’ own soaring lead vocals. With its minor chord energy, the song conveys the yearnings that lie beneath loss and hope.
Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu’s fluid guitar picking circles and floats under Giddens’ aching vocals, reminiscent of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, on the title track, which sets Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same title in a poignant musical setting.
Powell’s sawing fiddle imports a crafty darkness to “Step Away Blues,” a blend of Cajun and Delta blues that also features Powell’s acoustic guitar lead lines looping around notes from Giddens’ minstrel banjo. Towering vocals carry the gospel-inflected soul shouter “Carolina Rain” into the stratosphere, while Powell’s smooth guitar picking courses under Gidden’s somber vocals on their spare version of Elizbeth Cotten’s “Freight Train.”
Giddens opens her take on Ola Belle Reed’s classic “High on a Mountain” with her high lonesome a cappella vocals before the band cantors along in a bluegrass rambler; Giddens returns to her a cappella to close the song. The album closes with the spiritual blues shout “Going Home,” written by Pura Fé (Tuscarora/Taino); Lumbee singer Charly Lowry joins Giddens in this wailing cry to loss that can’t be replaced and to a land to which there is a longing to return.
Every track on ‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers‘ shimmers with the promises of light and love to illuminate the persistent darkness of our lives in these times.
