Olivia Chaney – Shelter
Nonesuch – 15 June 2018
Olivia’s latest Shelter is one of those albums that demands of you the same level of privileged intimacy with which it has been shared with you by Olivia and her producer Thomas Bartlett. Its outward fragility is not to be underestimated.
It’s been three years since Olivia’s enchanting yet challenging debut full-length album The Longest River appeared on the Nonesuch label, during which time-interval she’s contributed to the label’s Folk Songs album project with the Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant and Sam Amidon, as well as fronting the Decemberists in the guise of Offa Rex on their stunning 2017 album The Queen Of Hearts (reviewed here).
Shelter, while (like The Longest River) still recognisably Olivia’s work, is an even more minimally conceived in terms of its sound. And yet its title surely describes the close, reassuring cocoon of the music within, and both reflects, and can be heard in, its tremendous, almost overwhelming warmth and affection that strangely complements the feeling of proudly vulnerable isolation arising from the place of composition of eight of the album’s ten songs (a family retreat at a remote, barely habitable18th century cottage on the North York Moors). The sheer austerity of the location is mirrored in the deliberately sparse and minimalist musical settings. For only three musicians appear on the album, and that’s including Olivia herself (on piano, guitar, electric dobro, harmonium and pump organ) – the others being producer Thomas Bartlett (who plays op-1 synth, Rhodes bass, an almost subliminal smidgen of mellotron here and there and limited percussion on IOU) and Olivia’s long-time collaborator violinist Jordan Hunt. Less is indisputably more here.
Olivia pithily (and unexpectedly poetically) describes the difficult labour of the songwriting process (where “the demons do persist”) on the meditative, lone-guitar-backed title song that opens the disc. She explains the background to the cathartic cottage writing session thus: “I had been on the road a lot and was struggling with the grit and loneliness of urban life … questioning what home, belonging, a sense of purpose and my own culture even meant. I’d been craving wilderness and a return to essentials for a long time.” Judging by the creative intensity of these new songs, Olivia’s certainly regained her sense of purpose here. And the songs’ thoughts and concerns are unified by her trademark outstanding vocal presence.
Olivia’s literary expression is ever more artful too. On Dragonfly, for instance, an initial aura of Joni Mitchell (notably in those register leaps, but also the juxtaposition of images) and a seeming preoccupation with the distortion of memories is sealed by the folksong-like recurring refrain “someone stole her time”. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn shares images in quiet remembrance of Molly Malone as a character in an archetypal American novella. The simultaneous incompatibility and coming-together of the past and the present, ostensibly through religion, is cryptically explored via the country-church scenario of Colin And Clem. And the impossibility of resolving the central romantic dilemma of Arches is expressed in its desperately searching melodic lines.
In contrast, the antique-piano backdrop of Roman Holiday conjures from its balcony lovers’ duet not only a feeling of joyful abandon but also a sense of ancient inevitability that’s reinforced by a gentle string wash and the sound of distant bells, leading to the delicate disillusionment – and finally acceptance – of the album’s closing meditation House On A Hill, set to a placid yet restless Lied-like chordal progression that emphasises the overall serenity of the location and situation “where I’ve come to need less And many more will”.
Of the album’s two covers, the first – Henry Purcell’s setting of O Solitude (by early 17th century French poet Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant) – furthers Olivia’s predilection for the classical-baroque repertoire as previously displayed on There’s Not A Swain (on The Longest River), in a typically elegant performance that radiates almost effortless accomplishment while bringing out the text’s gently theatrical import. The second cover is a well-realised, brilliantly poised reinterpretation of the old Everly Brothers number Long Time Gone (written by Frank Harford and Tex Ritter), a choice that chimes in with the album’s dominant, often wistful melancholy.
Olivia’s music is always imbued with its own special atmosphere, and the songs making up Shelter are ideal vehicles for her individual brand of vocal expressionism, whereby much emotion can be disguised within an almost casual vocal flourish. Her expertise can occasionally make her seem slightly detached from that emotion – that is, until you listen closely to the nuances she obtains from her delivery. Even more so than its predecessor, Shelter is a series of teasingly enigmatic meditations leaving a distinct feeling that for all Olivia’s emotional candour there’s a persistent – albeit attractive – unknowability giving an added depth to her increasingly masterful songwriting.