In his live review of H.C. McEntire at The Islington, London in 2018, Folk Radio reviewer William Patrick Owen said the following about McEntire’s debut album Lionheart:
What’s so striking about the debut solo album from HC McEntire, Lionheart, is that it shows the tender pain and difficult reconciliation that LGBT people still face in communities more hostile. Though the US can often seem like our cultural cousins in terms of music, the arts, and identity politics – particularly in the cities on the coasts – there are of course deep swathes of that massive bulk of land where things couldn’t be more different. In the Deep South, Bible belt swathe that McEntire comes from this is certainly true, and her music pays testimony to the rejection she has faced from her community as an openly lesbian songwriter.
Willim patrick Owen
While that album felt like a baptism of new beginnings, her latest offering Eno Axis looks set to take a giant step. While Lionheart was written sporadically while touring Eno Axis was carved with a more consolidated intent.
After two years working all over the world as a backup singer in Angel Olsen’s band, McEntire came home to a hundred-year-old farmhouse tucked away in the woods of Durham, North Carolina, right on the Eno River from which the album takes its title. Here, McEntire was able to refocus. Like the blue-collar Appalachian kin she descended from, her days were scheduled by the clockwork of the Earth’s rotation: splitting wood, stacking it, weeding and watering the garden, walking the dog past the bridge and back—and every evening on the front porch, watching dusk fall. Eno Axis emerges from this time as the strongest work McEntire has shared yet.
H.C. McEntire’s new song Time, On Fire, offers the first glimpse of Eno Axis, the accompanying video triptych offers glimpses into McEntire’s daily rural rituals and observations. The video put me in mind Xylouris White and their Ascension video – “The cognitive assembly of daily duty is not merely how we obtain the essential things we need, it is also a path to higher consciousness.”It looks like it’s done the trick for McEntire and maybe these poems, directed straight to the listener will inspire change in these uncertain times.
McEntire describes “Time, On Fire” as “the catalyst to reopen my heart and mind. Its spirit also symbolizes the true foundation of Eno Axis; writing this song gave me direction to document the climb forward into new love.”
Eno Axis is out August 21 on CD, LP, and copper marble Peak Vinyl in the Merge store, or from your favourite independent record shop.
Photo Credit: Heather Evans Smith