Martha Scanlan Reverb(erates)

Martha Scanlan, The River and the Light; Sampler

Beautiful voice, reverb guitar, rivers, and the Montana landscape. Rinse and repeat. Scanlan’s fourth album is an intriguing mix of fragility and muscularity. We hear her delicate voice and think of a little bird, but then there are those big ringing guitar tones. From the moment you hear the first notes of “Brother Was Dying,” from her new (and fourth) album you’ll know why she’s shared stages with everyone from Levon Helm to Emmylou Harris. Longtime sidekick Jon Neufeld makes some serious resonant noise with his archtop guitar and Scanlan lays out the life cycles from birth to death and revival. Tellingly, “Revival” is the final track (or at least it was on my advance download). Both songs remind me of an earlier song of hers, “Shape of Things Gone Missing, Shape of Things to Come,” which tells you that Ms Scanlan accepts the fluidity of existence. This includes her personal journey. Scanlan is Montana-rooted, Minnesota-born, and spent some time in the smaller mountains of Appalachia. She pays homage to the last of these in “West Virginia Rain.” Most of her songs are deeply introspective, but “Las Cruces” has a nice kick to it that is reminiscent of how Joni Mitchell shaped songs in her folk phase. The only downside to her new record is that the lyrics are hard to make on amidst all the grounding chords and reverb, but, at the risk of cheap wordplay, when she and Neufeld play “Only a River,” the intro to “Blue Eyed Angel,” we feel washed down.  ★★★★

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