CD Odyssey Disc 1128: The Civil Wars

I’ve been re-reading old fantasy novels I’ve owned since I was a kid. Many are terrible, and that’s partly the idea; demystify them makes it easier to get rid of them. Some are surprisingly good, though. I’m on Volume Two of the six-volume Red Sonja series and it is pretty great stuff. Those will be keepers. I apologize to my overloaded library.

Disc 1128 is… The Civil Wars (Self-Titled)

Artist: The Civil Wars

Year of Release: 2013

What’s up with the Cover? Some kind of atmospheric civil war. I’m not sure if this is a cloud of ash from a fire or just one mean storm system, but it looks all kinds of awesome.

How I Came To Know It: I had first discovered their 2011 album “Barton Hollow” and was digging through their discography. Turns out it was just two albums, but I liked them both.

How It Stacks Up:  I have two Civil Wars albums, which is all there are ever going to be. Of those two I rank their self-titled effort #1. 2011’s “Barton Hollow” gets more street cred, but I think their self-titled follow up is consistently stronger.

Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4

The Civil Wars eponymous second album is bitter sweet: sweet because of the magic between Joy Williams and John Paul White, bitter because their second record would also prove to be their last. Tragic, but at least no one died – they just went their separate ways.

While they were together they created some solid indie folk music with a distinctive country flavour. Listening to this record you get the impression these guys would’ve been embraced by Nashville if they’d just been willing to stoop to a more saccharine pop sound. Thankfully, they demurred.

Williams’ vocals have a bit more sweetness in her tone (and when she calls on it, surprising power) and White provides a nice grounding, with a natural gift for an emotionally honest delivery. Most of the songs are either duets, harmonies or some combination of the two. Their harmonies are often loose, letting their two voices play off one another, with enough space in between that your ear can enjoy the differences.

There are a couple of occasions when they get caught up in experimenting in how many different ways they can stretch this tension and sacrifice the song’s melody in the process, but this is pretty rare and for the most part I either forgave it, or at least appreciated the effort.

White also contributes on guitar. He isn’t a master, but he is a versatile player who has a raw energy and a mellow strum. It feels like a sotto voce whisper; deliberately soft around the edges but insistent on being heard.

These songs are intimate explorations of the human condition which manage to remain optimistic at their core, even though they are often filled with heartache and doubt. “The One that Got Away” and “Same Old Same Old” are both songs about relationships in inexorable decay; collapsing even as former lovers bemoan their loss.

The album’s best song is “Dust to Dust” a song with rounded production and a pop-infused folk beat that reminded me of mid-eighties Bruce Springsteen, right before he went too far into the Land of the Drum Machine. Amid a lot of songs about heartache and poor choices, “Dust to Dust” is a plea to the broken to let love in and see what happens:

“All your actin'
Your thin disguise
All your perfectly delivered lies
They don't fool me
You've been lonely, too long”

The vocals lightly rush the beat, capturing the desperate insistence of those who want to let their walls down but have forgotten how.

The album features a couple of covers. Etta James’ “Tell Mama” is OK, but I don’t know the original so it is hard to compare. The band goes to great lengths to change the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm” into a folk song and it works, but I still found myself preferring the original.

Overall, “The Civil Wars” is a solid record, not afraid to cross genres and bare its soul while doing so. It takes a lot of turns and it loses me at a few of them, but it is never boring and has some songs that will seriously pull on your heartstrings.

Best tracks: The One That Got Away, Same Old Same Old, Dust to Dust, Devil’s Backbone, From this Valley