After his acclaimed 2020 solo debut Spider Tales, the American bluegrass fiddler, banjo player, Afrofuturist and historian returns with a starkly beautiful, atmospheric album drawing on old spiritual numbers and set in a climate-changed, apocalyptic world. Some are obscure, others are better known, such as Rosetta Tharpe’s Didn’t It Rain (hard to beat her version though) and Blind Willie McTell’s Just As Well Get Ready, You Got to Die. The album opens with Take Me To The Water / Prayer, in which Blount, backed with singers and acoustic instruments describes the setting of the “drowned city” after the sins of the forefathers brought disaster, before launching into the stirring bluegrass number The Downward Road, joined by rapper Demeanor. Tangle Eye Blues is a solemn, moving vocal number backed by unaccompanied violin, Parable is a storytelling song of storms with light percussion and plucked strings. Death Have Mercy is another standout mixing blues, spiritual and bluegrass again joined by an impassioned rap by Demeanor. Another standout is closing track Once There Was No Sun, which cleverly wraps up this circular sense of past and present rolling into each other in an album that goes back musical as it looks forward to a tragic dystopian future, one at least accompanied by fabulous music. Intelligent, poignant, pertinent and refreshing. Out on Smithsonian Folkways.
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