This Just Might be the Most Soulful Americana Album of the Year

Volume 4, Kieran Kane and Rayna Gellert

Kieran Kane is one of those Americana folk singers who falls into the mildly contradictory category ‘new traditionalists’, like Gillian Welch. Originally from New York, Kane is a long-term player in the alt-country scene, sounding a little like Buddy Miller, Willie Watson or Eric Bibb. Over the years, his sound has been stripping back so that it is now less alt-country-rock and more Appalachian folk.

After a few albums with fellow-alt-country singer Kevin Welch, Kane’s last four albums have been made with partner Rayna Gellert, with their seasoned voices melding seamlessly, like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings or Buddy and Julie Miller or the youthful duo 10 String Symphony. Kane and Gellert’s last album featured banjo and fiddle as well as acoustic guitar; this new one, appropriately titled Volume 4, is a strictly fiddle and guitar affair, except for the addition of a snare on one song – that’s about it. Production puts the few instruments and voices clear and to the fore.

The album begins with ‘I Can’t Wait’, reprised from an album with Kevin Welch. Though a Kane original, it sounds like an old spiritual, with its AAAB rhyming scheme and longing for burdens to be lifted in the afterlife. The lines ‘some day we’ll roll away the stone/that we have carried for so long’ may be a slightly mixed metaphor, but it’s an indication of its gospel ancestry.

‘The Mansion Above’, a slow waltz, has similarly spiritual themes, with a richness in lyrics without obfuscation or the defaulting to well-worn praise phrases. Kane sings of a dream where God urges repentance and peace with his neighbour, the chorus lifting unexpectedly with a delicate minor chord.

There’s a gentleness to much of this, though a few reels on the fiddle – two penned by Gellert – set the foot a-tapping. These tunes would be at home as much in Ireland or Prince Edward Island as in Nashville.

More down-to-earth themes are tackled in ‘Imagine That’, a sparkling alpine stream of a song, something that is bigger than the sum of its parts. It has the simplest of folk chord structures but a bittersweet warmth, as Kane sings in the traditional ‘woman’s gone’ genre, yearning softly for ‘someone to laugh with’.

The restless groove and buzzing fiddle of ‘Short Con’, where Gellert takes the lead vocal, recalls the likes of ‘Go Forth and Multiply’ off their first album. Kane has said that the song, with its more political themes, wasn’t intentional but just came out, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the wider political situation they find themselves in.

The album moves between the non-identical twins of Americana – a gentle, sparkling country-folk and a more angular, earthy, bluesy sound. The songs’ simultaneous simplicity and richness made me think of how much space for creativity there is between the bare walls of this traditional art form. And perhaps there is a reassurance in the tradition, in the midst of so much political and technological uncertainty.

Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big.