Libby Rodenbough
Between the Blades
Sleepy Cat Records
2023
“I know that I am not the only one who needs another world” is a line from the opening track of Libby Rodenbough’s new album ‘Between the Blades‘, and the best description I could offer of it. In just eight tracks, the North Carolina-based bluegrass singer and violinist addresses the 2020s era of existentialism with admirable curiosity and restrained despair. Despite being written during lockdown and the passing of her mother, Libby says the songs are not all about grief but “about trying to keep the faith”.
Recorded live by a group of long-term collaborators and friends at Bedtown Lakehouse in Virginia, the feeling of communal hope is woven into the fabric of the record. The loose, gang vocals, head-swaying folk rhythms and rubato entries in ‘Easier to Run‘ and ‘Make Light‘ capture that togetherness and make you feel a part of it. But unlike the more traditional collective voice of Rodenbough’s other band, Mipso, there is a sharper blade to the production: Loud and bare pizzicato strings, broken beats and whirring synths drowning sweet guitars. She creates a jarring playfulness that firmly removes the title of easy-listening and replaces it with an impressively authentic depiction of the up-and-down, loop-the-loop rollercoaster of collective confusion we have all felt over the last half a decade.
I can usually select a few lines from an album that stand out, that fit neatly in a subordinate clause, but my notes pages for this review are just large, unedited paragraphs of Libby Rodenbough’s lyrics (found on her Bandcamp!). The opening tune, partly inspired by The Dawn of Everything: A New Human History (David Graeber and David Wengrow), hits so many home truths it left me laughing and bleeding. ‘Everybody knows it’s too bad what we’ve come to‘ followed by ‘what are you gonna do? Take a new kind of picture? Say a new prayer for the world / get blood from a stone / tell a new kind of joke?‘ and my personal favourite, ‘But if it all goes south / there will be dancing down there‘. If that doesn’t sum up the relentless hope of humankind, I don’t know what does.
In my view, the following three songs pay immediate homage to the thought patterns of the disenfranchised and grieving: ‘Make Light‘, ‘Sleeping Hard‘, and ‘Easier to Run‘. However, ‘Sleeping Hard‘ is the only point in the album where Libby allows despair to play the leading role. Her powerful voice seems tired and laden as she laments the billionaires, ‘Up in the buildings where the windows shine / they’re making money out of wasted time‘. With the soft, low drums’ Limping on‘ at a lethargic walking pace, this moving tune is another example of Libby Rodenbough’s ability to replicate a feeling in both word and song.
Between the Blades is a deeply personal and creative exploration of emotions and ideas that are slowly arising in the public conscience. It is an offering of questions, not answers, questions that continue to roll around in my mind as I do the washing up in the form of beautiful, catchy melodies, bringing hope in place of despair.
Bandcamp: https://libbyrodenbough.bandcamp.com/album/between-the-blades