Heartworn Highways Relives 1970s Outlaw Country Music

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS

Directed by Jim Szalapski

MVD Visual, 92 minutes, Re-release of 1981 original.

In the United States, anything that isn’t classical, opera, or jazz gets lumped into the category of “popular music.” For now I’ll ignore the fact that such distinctions are looser than old elastic. Many film buffs would say that the greatest "popular" music documentaries of all time are Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1976) and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984). If either film has a flaw, it is that each is simply a concert film—glorious ones shot in path-breaking ways, but there wasn’t a whole lot of script work to be done. Let’s add another to the list of top popular music films, Jim Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways. It was shot in late 1975 and early 1976, but wasn’t released until 1981. That’s rather fitting, as many of its country music subjects didn’t attract a lot of notice until around then.

Heartworn Highways is also script-challenged, but its visuals reveal volumes. Scorsese and Demme sought to iconize The Band and The Talking Heads, but they were already famous. That was not the case of those in Szalapski’s film: Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Larry Jon Wilson, Steve Young, Gamble Rogers, David Allan Coe, and an unrecognizably young Steve Earle. Back then, even the Charlie Daniels Band filled high school auditoriums, but not big arenas. They folks were “outlaws” in that their brand of country music evoked old-time country music, especially its balladic traditions. To put matters in perspective, they were the contemporaries of chart toppers such as Glen Campbell, John Denver, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Milsap, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, and Tanya Tucker. Not to take anything away from them, but theirs was a country music defined by big labels, mass markets, and image-makers. It was not necessarily what made the heart sing down at Big Mack McGowan’s Wigwam Tavern, the kind of place where really good (and really awful) players came together to sing old-style country. It’s also where you’d find Glenn Stegner, who once played with Uncle Dave Macon.   

The folks in Heartworn Highways are those hanging out in the dirt-poor back roads of Texas and Tennessee. There’s no context or explanation in this loosely structured film, but we infer they’re all connected to Guy Clark. We visit Van Zandt at his Austin trailer, where dogs, chickens, rabbits, and squalor surround him. We drop in on Wilson in the recording studio the morning after he had partied the night away, watch Clark rebuild his guitar, witness one of Rogers’ stand-up good ‘ole boy comedy routines, and join Coe as he pilots his bus towards a gig at the Tennessee State Prison—a place where his daddy spent most of his life and Coe also did time. Check out Coe’s concert duds; by contrast they make Vegas Elvis, Gene Simmons of KISS and Alice Cooper look like GQ covers. There’s hardly a scene in which we don’t see the men with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The women are mostly in the kitchen or putting up with small barbs from their men, a reminder of how different the world was before second wave feminism trickled down. You might even be tempted to dismiss all of these guys as deplorable—until they sing. There’s an amazing encounter between Townes Van Zandt and his black neighbor, 79-yeard-old Seymour Washington. Van Zandt rambles incoherently and Washington holds forth on the virtues of moderation. (Wrong audience!) Then Townes picks up the guitar, sings “Waitin’ Around to Die,” as Washington washes the tears from his face. It’s a helluva song and a tender moment that reminds us that these country outlaws drew from streams watered by hard times, the blues, heartbreak, folk music, and pain. It’s impossible not to be moved by songs like “Ohoopee River Bottomland” (Wilson), “Bluebird Wine” (Crowell), or “Alabama Highway” (Young). Above them stood Clark, who sings with ease and writes with grace. He zings off a masterpiece like “L.A. Freeway” and just put down the guitar. Everyone of these folks could/can pick a guitar like a demon—their connections to African American country blues evident in each finger movement.

Szalapski’s camera work is on par with the music. You might often wonder who is on screen as there are no title boxes to inform you, but it doesn’t matter. Szalapski uses montage, collage, rapid sequences, and artful shots—like those of trucks shedding sheets of water during a downpour—with slow pan shots that bathe us in life among the other half and it’s a more effective lesson than any sociologist could teach. Contrast all of this with the airbrushed glitz of Dollywood and you’ll know what made them outlaws. Listen to today’s country music with its blistering guitar work and the willingness (of some) to tackle social issues, or the very renown now held by Charlie Daniels and Steve Earle, and you’ve got you answer about why these rebels mattered. Guy Clark, in my opinion, remains one of the most underappreciated geniuses of our time.

This is not your average documentary. It lets image and song tell the story and expects viewers to fill in the gaps. It is truly remarkable film and we should be thankful that DVD Visuals has made it available again.

Rob Weir

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The Square: Too Enigmatic for its Own Good?

THE SQUARE (2017)

Directed by Ruben Östlund

TriArt, 151 minutes, R (nudity, language, disturbing images)

In Swedish, Danish, English, and English subtitles

★★★

The Square was Sweden's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2108 Oscars. Watching it explains instantly why it was nominated and why it did not—indeed could not—win. It has much to say, but it's an experimental film marked by insight and incoherence, poignancy and puzzlement, and fine performances and mediocre ones. Director Ruben Östlund seems aware of these contradictions, yet embraces them, integrates them into the plot, and uses them to parody the very world of conceptual art to which he belongs.

Let's start with how the film is routinely digested for movie listings. It uses the artist's statement for the work at the film's periphery: "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations." This leads one to think the film is some sort of docudrama about an enigmatic piece of art: a literal square cut into courtyard paving stones whose borders are marked by a solid line of white light. That certainly did not propel me into the theater. In the movie, though, the work is talked about more than actually shown. This suggests that The Square needed a better marketing campaign, but marketing is one of the targets of Östlund's lampoon—another odd choice given that such a work actually exists and was not fashioned by the film's fictional Lola Arias, but by Östlund himself and two others.

What's going on here? The Square's protagonist is Christian (Claes Bang), the curator of the Stockholm X-Royal Art Museum, whose forte is edgy conceptual art the likes of which straddle the razor's edge between bold and just plain bullshit. There is, for example, a room filled with conical piles of dirt. What do you make of that? And what if I told you that Yoko Ono actually made such an installation? Östlund's own Square is a riff on environmental artists such as Julian Schnabel and you'll also find sneaky references to Robert Smithson, Carl Hammond, and Oleg Kulik. That is, if you even know who these people are. This too is a cloaked insider joke. To know these people requires a level of familiarity that often presents as sophistication. Is it, or is it self-reverential snobbery? There's a delicious early scene in which Anne (Elisabeth Moss), a journalist, asks Christian to explain one of the museum's own statements about an exhibit. She reads him the verbatim postmodern mangling of language and Christian can but parrot back a few of the words Anne has just read. She replies that she has no more questions, though it was just her second. This won't prevent the two from bedding, though, so let's cut to a few other things in play.

The Square also skewers bourgeois and sophisticate values, especially the hypocrisy of how the well heeled speak with such passion of how the art and their lives identify with "the voiceless," yet each day they rush by street beggars. Another scene—which actually happened—finds Christian unable to complete a public interview as he is constantly interrupted by vulgarities from a man with Tourettes Syndrome. The very idea that this person should not be allowed to remain in the auditorium is met with vigorous protest from those decrying that those with such problems should not be marginalized. In fact, this is a double parody; it also explores the tension between the cultural decorum of Swedes versus the dilemmas posed by absolute tolerance. Such conundrums rise again when an ad firm produces a buzz video. A blond child stands in the Square and a voiceover challenges viewers to prove they truly are passionate. A clock ticks down and the little girl is blown to smithereens. (Echoes of the famed "daisy" ad from the 1964 POTUS campaign.) An outraged media descends upon Christian, but their outrage is all over the map. Some denounce the videos' poor taste, some want to know why the child was blond and not representative of those more likely to be downtrodden, and still others accuse Christian of self-censorship when he announces the ad has been pulled and that he has tendered his resignation. This one has a very surprising resolution.

The Square is filled with questions about the limits of altruism and tolerance, including a performance art dinner for big donors in which simian-like actors pose as wild beasts. How tolerant can we be before our own atavistic instincts reemerge? As you might surmise, Christian is the biggest hypocrite of all—though he will be challenged in poignant ways.

Bang is terrific as Christian and Dominic West shows up speaking, from I can tell, fluent Swedish. Christopher Læssø is riveting as a black man who is never quite sure of whom to trust and whom to fear. Moss, however, is a noticeable weak link. That startled me as she has attracted attention for past performances and is considered by many to be a rising serious actress. In The Square though, she is clingy, libidinous, and shallow. That may be what the script called for, but if so, it doesn't work very well. The real question is whether audiences will get what is essentially a satirical drama, or simply get lost in all the unexplained weirdness. The Square won the Palme d'Or, but the Cannes festival delights in honoring quirky films. I liked this film, but it has holes and it's simply too outré for mass tastes. Is that another message?

Rob Weir

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Lincoln in the Bardo: Strange and Wondrous

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO (2017)

By George Saunders

Random House, 368 pages

★★★★

What happens the moment we die is the ultimate mystery, so it’s hardly surprising that not even religious traditions agree. Eternal non-existence? Reincarnation? Life after death? Quite a few belief systems speculate a temporary middle ground; Roman Catholicism’s Purgatory is by no means the only doctrine on such matters. George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo draws upon a Tibetan belief in an in-between space in which the departed is neither alive nor dead—the novel’s namesake bardo.

Lincoln in the Bardo was a controversial choice for the Booker Prize and not just because of its subject matter; Saunders is the first American writer to win the Booker and it infuriates many in the Brit Lit crowd that Yanks are even considered. That such an “experimental novel” has been honored is another level of debate, though the Booker often goes to works that cause traditionalists to spit out their Earl Grey. The only real question is whether this is a great novel. My verdict? Almost.

The year is 1862 and it has become apparent that the American Civil War will be more charnel house than a hall of heroes. Death becomes very personal to President Lincoln when a typhoid epidemic carries off his eleven-year-old son Willie, a jovial boy beloved by all and the president’s favorite child. This would be a fine book for its unvarnished look at grief alone—many speculate that Willie’s death drove Mary Todd Lincoln mad—but Saunders has a far more ambitious goal in mind. NPR called this book a “worm’s-eye view of death,” and that’s a pretty good way of describing it. Saunders claims part of what he wanted to communicate is embodied in the way Mary cradles the crucified Jesus in Michelangelo’s sculpture The Pieta.

The bardo is where one comes to grips with being dead; hence many there are as yet unaware of their fates. Each is present in the condition in which they arrived plus whatever ravages time takes on the physical body. The bardo is imbued with Edward Gorey levels of creepiness stripped of its Edwardian sense of propriety. Young Willie has been (temporarily) laid to rest in a Georgetown crypt until he can be carried back to the family home in Illinois. He doesn’t have much to say, but 166 other “ghosts” have views on everything—some of it unsettling, some amusing, some philosophical, but little of it self-aware. The narrators come from all walks of past lives: slaves, soldiers, hunters, prostitutes, laborers, homemakers…. This many voices would be a muddle, thus Saunders focuses mostly on three. The Rev. Everly Thomas knows he’s dead, but hasn’t moved on for a reason. Our sad ghost is Roger Bevins III, a closeted gay man who committed suicide; and the resident Falstaff is Hans Vollman, an older man who married a younger woman and was just about to consummate their union when a beam fell from the roof and snuffed out of his life, but not his engorged erection.

Saunders spins tales in snippets, few of which are longer than few sentences. His is a masterful job of imagined dialogue stitched to cut-and-paste passages from diaries, history books, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and other written sources. The ghosts are aware of each other and interact—often in unexpected ways. Sometimes they are as amusing as the movie-obsessed ghosts in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply; often their stories are more poignant and tragic.

It’s clear that Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t any kind of historical novel, but it’s much harder to say what, exactly, we should call it. It’s a fascinating read that I devoured in just two sittings, but I’m less willing to slap the “experimental” label onto it. Saunders’ technique is quite similar to that of Edgar Lee Masters in his 1915 Spoon River Anthology, which has the added merit (and difficulty) of having been written in verse. It also bears resemblance in set-up and tone to Kevin Brockmeier’s underappreciated masterwork The Brief History of the Dead (2006). Brockmeier built upon Eastern African tribal eschatology in which the living become Sasha at death—a kind of holding pattern where one stays until the last person still alive who remembers you passes away. Only then is one Zanan (dead).

So perhaps Saunders’ book isn’t quite as unique as some would have it. It is, however, beautifully written. If, along the way, you wish also to see it as capturing the collateral damage of war, an elegy, or commentary on something grander (the Holocaust?), it is testament to Lincoln in the Bardo that it provokes such thoughts. I can only tell you this: you will know within ten pages whether or not this is your cup of Earl Grey. If you like those ten pages, you will zip through the rest; if not, leave it on the shelf, as the next 358 pages are similar. As for its UK naysayers, the Brits need to get over themselves; this book is far more deserving of the Booker than a lot of previous winners.

Rob Weir

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T C Cannon at Peabody through June 10

T C CANNON: AT THE EDGE OF AMERICA

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

Through June 10, 2018

People caught between two cultures often produce fascinating art, especially the type often labeled “outsider art.” We can extol the virtues of hyphenated identity all we wish, but those on both sides of the hyphen often view those who carry bifurcated identities with suspicion. They occupy cultural spaces that practically define the term liminal.

I first saw the paintings of T C Cannon (1946-1978) at the Heard Museum of Art in Phoenix in the 1980s and was instantly drawn to his bold colors, ambiguous facial expressions, and the tensions inherent within a blended body whose Caucasian background (American/French) was valued, but the Indian identity he held most sacred (figuratively and literally) was, at best, exoticized (and often racialized).

In a life cut short by a fatal auto accident in 1978, Cannon explored the borders of several art forms: music, poetry, and painting. Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum has assembled 90 works to shed new light on Cannon’s underappreciated genius. Much of this work is either self-consciously autobiographical or inherited expressions of the collective unconscious as embedded in the Native past. Even the latter was splintered; Cannon’s strongest bloodline was Kiowa, closely followed by Caddo, which isn’t a single tribe or people, rather a confederation of Southeastern groups. And there is also the fact that Cannon came of age during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. An early painting is of Bob Dylan, but it’s an attempt to capture Dylan’s attitude and vibe, not his exact likeness.

Still others are commentary on the irony of Natives such as himself serving in the very military that sent an Indian lad such as he to Vietnam; Cannon was in the 101st Airborne during 1967-68, a stretch that placed him in the middle of the Tet Offensive. One of the most subversive pieces is deceptively crude and simple: a hastily drawn hangman’s noose that’s labeled “Minnesota.” It’s perplexing unless you know that the largest mass execution in American history took place in Mankato, Minnesota on December 26, 1862, when 38 Dakota Sioux were hanged. It occurred during the Civil War and the president who refused to pardon them was named Lincoln.

Lots of Cannon paintings convey what W.W.B. DuBois called “twoness,” those “two souls … two warring ideals in one dark body.” Several of Cannon’s most powerful works are at core schizophrenic. One cleaves the body in two—the right hand side an Indian proud in his ceremonial paint and braids; the left half a bearded Anglo soldier. Others feature mash ups of Indian garb and military uniforms. Two other canvases satirize Western art by taking one of art’s favorite subjects, the nude Odalisque figure (most famously rendered by Ingres) and pose Indian subjects in the place of Turkish harem slaves. Layer these with as many shaded meanings as you’d like; Cannon intended them all. 

Cannon mostly painted people ill at ease in their cultural time and spaces. There is a haunted lonely quality to canvases such as His Hair Flows Like a River. He gives himself the same treatment in Self-Portrait in the Studio. What is he in this picture? A hippie? A psychedelic cowboy? A John Travolta extra? Or just a playful guy wearing duds so awful they could have only been made in the 1970s?

The Peabody exhibit also features some of Cannon’s poetry. It might not satisfy formalists, but his lines convey power and pain. Do some searching and you might even run across some of his political folk music. Cannon’s Kiowa name was Pal-doung-a-day, “One Who Stands in the Sun.” His rays continue to shed light on ills not yet reconciled.

Rob Weir

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Video Review: Step

STEP  (2017)

Directed by Amanda Liptiz

Fox Searchlight, PG, 83 minutes.

★★★

Faithful readers know that a criterion I use to evaluate movies is the degree to which they take us inside worlds we're unlikely to enter ourselves. Step certainly does that for me. It's about an all-female charter school, the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSYW). The BLSYM is mostly African American and the film's subject is about a phenomenon about which I had never heard. We drop in on the seniors of BLSYM in 2015, a tough time to be black and in Baltimore, as that's the year Freddie Gray was murdered by city cops.  School principal Cheronne Hall and head of guidance Paula Dofat have a daunting and audacious goal: keep their students focused, graduate every one of them, and attain a 100% college acceptance rate.

For many of these young women, step is a release from inner-city troubles, personal trauma, the classroom grind, and poverty. Where I live, step dancing evokes Riverdance—Irish music, stiff upper bodies, and flying leg kicks. In Baltimore, think something akin to slices of a Beyoncé video, the step being an increment—those individual pieces stitched together into a choreographed set. Step teams compete, confer street cred, and instill a sense of personal achievement.    

Director Amanda Liptiz's documentary highlights two connected struggles, one academic and the other the fate of the BLSYW step team. She goes broad rather than deep, but gives just enough to keep viewers engaged. We witness both battles in vignette, but step is the star. There's a new coach, Gari McIntyre, who hopes to reverse past history—the BLSYM Lethal Ladies team hasn't done well in recent years—and she dares dream she can whip them into shape to get to the championship round in Bowie, Maryland.

Has anyone been to Bowie? It's an okay place, but Paris it isn't, and aspiring to get to Bowie is its own statement of small dreams. Students cycle in and out of the documentary, but mainly Liptiz focuses on three—who metaphorically represent the top, middle, and low end of the student body. Cori Grainger is the outlier at the crest. She's brilliant, studious, and ambitious Her heart is set on being accepted at Johns Hopkins, but she knows she has to dazzle as she's of six kids and needs a full scholarship to go anywhere, let alone Hopkins. Cori certainly assumes her desired role; call hers a nerd chic look. As she puts it, she got to the top, liked the view, and decided to stay there.

Tayla Solomon is akin to the average student at BLSYM. She does fine in school, but she's not Hopkins material. She is, however, kept in line by her no-nonsense single mom, Maisha, a correctional officer unafraid to wield her discipline at home. And then we have Blessin Giraldo, the founder and captain of the Lethal Ladies. She's bright enough, but she also spends more time on her hair and makeup than schoolwork; she's truant a lot, sometimes angry, and carrying a sub 2.0 grade-point average. Vote her the least likely student to get to college.

Much of what we see in this film defies expectations. Most of the families are poor, but they do not live in squalor. In some ways, their invisible poverty is tougher; the girls look good and their homes are tidy, but there's often no food in the fridge. That's actually one of the burdens Blessin carries; she occasionally goes without food so a younger sibling can eat. She says she doesn’t mind, but we know better. If you think making it to Bowie is a modest goal, most students of Tayla's ilk aren't waiting to hear from Smith or the Ivies; they're really hoping they can make it into schools like Alabama A & M, Potomac State, or Allegany—that is, the ones you won't find battling for prestige in the U.S. News and World Reports college rankings. Each student, though, knows that college—any college—offers hope for a better life.

I won't reveal how any of this—college or step competition—plays out. Nor will I tell you that this is the most brilliant film you'll see. Liptiz has made a film that moves briskly, but has lacunae we'd like to see filled. What's the deal, for instance, with Cori's stepfather—  a bearish white guy with a bushy red beard we encounter in seas of black and brown faces? We don’t learn much about the school, either. How are students and faculty chosen? How does it fit within the Baltimore educational system? Mainly we want to know how these young women fare down the road, the true test of whether the heroic efforts of their teachers and step coach were worth the effort.

Step has been called the Hoop Dreams of the hip-hop generation. There are also parallels to Fame. It’s not on par with either film, but it does take us inside a world hitherto veiled. I hope that Liptiz follows the example of Michael Apted (Seven Up) and does a sequel that updates her charges. Or maybe I don’t. It would break my heart if any of these young women fail.

Rob Weir

Norman: Good Overlooked Film

NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER  (2017)

Directed by Joseph Cedar

Sony, 158 minutes, R (language and because those rating it are insane!)

★★★½

Hollywood dominates the North American movie hype machine, so we hear less about so-called niche markets like Spanish-language films, Bollywood imports, and “hood” movies targeted for black urban markets. There is also a thriving Jewish cinema, which has long wrestled with the question of whether to mainstream or brand its products as identity films. Generally it seeks to do a bit of each and I’ll leave it to others to say how successful (or not) this approach has been. My film judgment tends to rest on the decidedly less weighty criterion of whether or not I like the film. If you share that view, I think you’ll find Norman a film worthy of consideration.

Norman Offenheimer (Richard Gere) is Manhattan “fixer.” He’s the guy who (says he) knows people who know people who can introduce you to people you ought to know. Got that? The Yiddish for such a person is macher and it doesn’t have an easy English translation. Norman’s not exactly a con man and he’s certainly not the “wise guy” trope we find in Italian-American movies. The macher strives to be influential, a hot shot to be sure, but a mover and shaker with a Border collie mentality and a sense of duty to community lurking somewhere. Norman’s problem is that he’s good enough at the racket to be semi-convincing and it would be better for all concerned if he was either really good or really awful. He’s also a bit of a mystery man in that he’s always dapper, but doesn’t seem to be well off, and few know exactly how he supports himself or where he goes when he’s not in public. He also comes off as desperate to be a player—all dressed up with nothing to fix. Lightweight dreamer or heavy-duty huckster? How does one classify a person who is more of a serial exaggerator rather than a liar?

Norman’s big break comes when he tries to use a sullen mid-level Israeli politician, Misha Eshel (Lior Askkenazi), to thread his way between two high-powered Manhattan financiers, Jo Wilf and Arthur Taub. Instead, Norman ends up doing a good deed for a self-doubter who, three years later, is Prime Minister of Israel. All of a sudden Norman is a player. The question for the rest of the film is whether he can do good with his power, or if he’s a walking, talking textbook case of the Peter Principle in way over his head.

Director Joseph Cedar tells Norman’s tale in four acts, but don’t assume that the word “tragic” in the title is what you think. The film is filled with humor and poignancy and Gere is really good as Norman, whom he plays with enough charm to make you care about him, but also with an obsequious whininess that makes him unlikely to be on your cocktail party guest list. There are also nice parts for Steve Buscemi as a scheming rabbi, Charlotte Gainsbourg as a secretive Israeli government official, and a very juicy part for Hank Azarian, who is essentially Norman thirty years earlier. The interplay between Gere and Azarian alone justifies watching the film; they go eyeball to eyeball like a hungry young dog trying to convince a street-wise older cur to drop his bone. As the four-act structure suggests, this ‘movie’ often feels more like a well-done Off-Broadway theater project, my point being that it feels “small” in cinematic terms. Luckily the acting takes us places the camera doesn’t. So too does a script—also from Cedar—that doesn’t invite easy judgments about anyone’s basic character, motives, or deeds. And what makes a better Jewish morality tale than one centered on conflict and guilt?

Rob Weir

April 2018 Album of the Month: Altan

ALTAN (2018)

The Gap of Dreams

★★★★★

Now in its 31^st year, Ireland’s mighty Altan shows no signs of letting up. Not if The Gap of Dreams is any measure. The album’s title comes from a line in a Francis Carlin poem and references the space between this world and the Otherworld and I’ll de damned if I know in which Altan resides.

You know you’re in for a magical ride from the get go. The title track is appended to a tune called “Nia’s Jig” (in honor of singer/fiddler Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s 14-year-old daughter), and another titled “The Beekeeper.” It’s your classic Celtic Big Set, except it’s more accomplished than most—the sort into which instruments don’t jump in and out, they slide through small spaces so adroitly that one never notices the seams where they join. You’ll get another accomplished pastiche on a collection labeled “A Spirited Night,” and indeed it is, with Martín Tourish muscular accordion tossing off precision, staccato-like runs that clear the way for Ní Mhaonaigh’s fiddle to launch into the second tune. The effect is joyous, magical, and magisterial—as we have indeed crossed a special threshold. “The Tullaghan Lasses” is an equally memorable set; this one featuring fiddles chasing their own musical tails.

Ní Mhaonaigh has always been at the center of the Altan swirl—she with the voice of a delicate bird that stands in marked contrast to her robust fiddle playing. As she has matured, so too has her voice—now sporting a subtle burnishing at the edges that makes it less fragile. “The Month of January” is a like a lullaby for adults, and her lead on “Bucach Shíl Andaí” takes us to sonic places analogous to material from Clannad (which actually did this song years ago). To really get a sense of where she’s headed, try “Níon a’ Bhaoigheallaigh,” * which is edgy and throbbing in all the right places. As songs such as these suggest, Ní Mhaonaigh showcases the Irish language, though she’s also superb in English, as we hear on “DarkInishowen,” a lamentation on being separated from the heart’s object of affection.

Everything on this album rings, clicks, swoops, and wails as it should. Listen hard also for the crystalline purity of guitar work from Daíthí Sproule and Mark Kelly, and softer percussive notes from Ciarán Curran’s bouzouki. The Gap of Dreams leaves one with little doubt as to why Altan stands at the pinnacle of modern Irish music.

*This may have been renamed from the preview release. Also, the sync is slightly off in the video.  

Rob Weir