Christian Williams – To the Trees
I didn’t hear much of a peep out of you lot when I last reviewed Christian Williams’ stuff, but I really think you should be paying it more attention than that. It’s not just another dark country album in my increasingly large collection, this really is rather special.
Williams himself describes this as gothic prairie music, and that conjures the perfect impression of what you will hear. I don’t know about real prairies, being an ignorant Englander, nor their music, but I know what they look like, having spent a little time in central Canada as a child. The image of bleak emptiness they call to mind is perfectly encapsulated by the warm, resigned heartbreak of this music.
There’s a lot of folk in it, as well as what I would rather vaguely call Americana. It sounds incredibly old-fashioned, old enough that songs like the superb To The Trees even manage to remind me of something vaguely Celtic, and presumably a lot of the really old folk music from those parts came from the original Scottish, Irish and Dutch settlers*.
For such an archetypal album, there is rich variety in this as well. The pace ebbs and flows beautifully, and the whole thing is beautiful to listen to in one go, something you can say for far too few releases these days. I recommended his previous album, but I really recommend this. Lovely.
Christian Williams – To the Trees
Christian Williams – The Recluse Anna Brown
Christian Williams – 30 Minutes
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*Not that the Dutch are a Celtic nation, of course. And also, I really don’t know which nations were most responsible for settling the prairies, but I’m fairly certain these three were pretty well represented. If anyone wants to correct me or elaborate on this, feel absolutely free.
Hmmm… I don’t know.
There’s clearly a lot to compliment here, that banjo playing is wonderful, but I’m not quite buying in.
It’s that old-fashioned approach to the writing that’s bothering me. Unless these are actually old folk standards from a century ago; they come across to me as impersonations, facsimiles of songs from another period.
I’m reminded of that Canadian lad who wrote the sea shanties in the 1970s about whom you wrote a while back; clearly a significant talent, but I found it difficult to connect with.
It strikes me that both artists appear to write so far outside their personal experience that it just doesn’t ring true.
You can argue you can interpret these songs in a metaphorical manner to reflect the modern experience, or that there’s value in maintaining historical songwriting styles like this, and you’ll be making a perfectly valid point.
But for me music is more than a history lesson, and needs to have an emotional resonance that I’m just not finding here.
Thanks for these, I’m really enjoying this.
Prairie settlers – a lot of them where actually Scandanavian. Germans as well. There you go…
Well when the Willard Grant Conspiracy write their bloody folk tales, or Nick Cave writes his carnival nightmares both are also writing pretty far outside personal experience, but both ring genuinely true to my ears.
And is re-exploring an old style of music any different if that music happens to be a hundred or so years old instead of, say, current groups who are revisting the sounds of the 80s?
A Free Man is quite correct – Americana lends a lot of its origins to the Germanic / Bavarian folk traditions. It’s amazing how German certain parts of America are – one example that always springs to mind is the Texas chain of Schlitterbahn Waterparks, especially the one in New Braunfels, TX (www.newbraunfels.com/), which is almost a little Bavaria.
In 2007, at the height of summer, I had the absolute pleasure of wasting an entire day tubing the Comal & Guadalupe Rivers — the best waste of time doing nothing I have ever experienced (www.texastubes.com).
Now that does not sound shit.
Matthew, the notion of revisting, assimilating and reinventing music from the past is essentially the driving force that keeps music moving forward.
But this doesn’t seem to be doing the assimilating and reinventing parts, it’s just doing the revisiting. Essentially it’s a copy of something that already existed.
I want to acknowledge that if these are old songs from the period, then things are different. Keeping traditional music alive and performing music from the past is important, valuable and rewarding.
But these songs sound freshly written – and I can’t see the appeal in that – why write songs that sound like they were written a hundred years ago? Why not find some of the genuine songs from a hundred years ago, perform them, and introduce a new audience to them? Then they can begin to have an influence, and the assimilation and reinvention starts, and music as a whole takes a step forward.
I don’t have a fundamental problem with this sort of stuff, its existence doesn’t annoy me, but – without being facetious – I file it away with period dramas and civil war re-enactments. Fine; if that’s your bag, baby. It just ain’t mine.
But that just isn’t the case. Go and listen to any of the Smithsonian Folkways compilations from that time, and it’s pretty clear that this isn’t just basic reproduction. In fact, more or less all of us should do that anyway, because they’re brilliant.
It just sound to me that there’s a point at which music becomes sufficiently old fashioned that you lose interest, because you hear a ’sound’. I do this with a lot of genres, but it tends to come from a lack of familiarity.
New Braunfels sounds terrifying.