Carson McHone‘s third album is a dense, multi-faceted tapestry, with fragments of poetry, spoken verse, field recordings, pastoral folk, guitar and chamber pop, amply demonstrating the benefits of a more collaborative approach on this audacious gem.
No one can accuse Carson McHone of resting on her laurels since her debut release, Carousel, in 2019, the title of which was a reference to what she once described as the “velvet rut” of the Austin music scene, where a songwriter can get so comfortable they end up isolated, endlessly playing the same venues in their home town. Pentimento comes hot on the heels of a busy and prolific three years that has seen the Austin-native relocate to Canada, tour relentlessly, and release two EPs.
Album number three for Carson McHone takes its name from the Italian word for “repentance”. The term “pentimento” also signifies a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas. It’s entirely appropriate for the multi-layered, multi-faceted nature of this new record, which fully deserves to bring McHone to a wider audience.
Having shown her ability to update the Texan honky tonk tradition in a modern idiom with Carousel, McHone moved with what felt like apparent ease towards a rockier sound on the Still Life album in 2022, although even that showed distinct nods towards R&B, southern soul, and folk music.
However, it’s clear that even prior to her sophomore release, she was already casting her vision to more ambitious vistas, with many of the songs on Pentimento already written during lockdown, the initial spur for this creativity being the journal that her mother presented her with in the autumn of 2020. Begun 28 years earlier, this took the form of entries addressed by her mother, Margaret Bentley, to her newborn daughter. It proved timely, seeing as McHone was already entering a period of transition, being newly married and having just moved from her native home of Austin to join Daniel Romano in southern Ontario, some 1,500 miles away. With the pandemic entering its second wave, the tectonic plates of Carson’s world were clearly beginning to shift in different ways.
Pentimento was written in the Texas desert and recorded on the Canadian coast with fellow collaborators Colleen Coco Collins, Michael Cloud Duguay, Raha Javanfar, Steven Lambke, and Daniel Romano (with readings credited to Margaret Bentley as well as André and Layla Benitez-James).
Her chronicling of this time has taken shape in the form of this record, with the first words we hear from McHone on the spoken word introduction – accompanied by birdsong – originating from a Ralph Waldo Emerson letter in 1840 that opens the journal: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”
Carpe Diem is a bold message with which to start any record, but it’s one that McHone and her fellow band members prove themselves more than equal to, seizing the opportunity to make what feels like a career-defining leap forward on this record. The three-note bird whistle that accompanies the introductory Emerson passage is echoed by McHone’s own mimic’d whistle, before a tinkling piano takes up the line, and the first single, Winter Breaking, bursts forth – an ethereal, guitar pop gem, with a dazzling, angular guitar riff that gives the song a real sense of momentum.
Second single from the album, Downhill, has the same dynamic and propulsive sense of movement as its predecessor, its opening guitar line sounding like a glorious mash-up between The Byrds and Velvet Underground, while McHone’s lyrics revisit some particularly vivid childhood memories:
“I remember downhill, I remember sweat in my eyes/I remember the bitter taste of asphalt, I remember blood in my hair and I cannot yet forget/The memory that’s impressed upon my skin/From falling fast..”
Colleen Coco Collins’s up-front bass lines and some understated drumming here create a captivating push and pull, helping to showcase McHone’s evolving sound.
The song downshifts at its mid-point, with McHone singing that she will follow the birds mentioned in the song “at a crawl”, before it speeds up once more towards its thrilling finalé.
Vision in the Verse represents a move into more balladic, pastoral folk territory with some beautifully strummed guitar from Romano and accordion from Michael Cloud Duguay, while third single, Idiom, adds chamber pop to the folk mix, via a chiming guitar riff and stirring harmonies – again allied to imagery of avian life – a constant throughout this record: “If unholy the heart what then is the love?/I’ll choke on my song, so spare the dove”.
Fruits of My Tending, which includes Daniel Romano reciting one of his poems (“Sat Before A Swan”) between its verses, was composed in the Texas desert, and this provides it with a suitably elemental feel, its initial folk drone underpinning its spoken word passages. It’s in distinct contrast to some squally guitar from Romano and heated bass from Lambke that emerge around the three-minute mark, the pair of them duking it out in a headlong rush towards its conclusion. It fully captures the spontaneity at the heart of much of this recording.
It’s on the haunting sound of Wake You Well that the influences of English pastoral folk on McHone really come to the fore, her singing here almost acapella at times, the only backdrop to this sparse number being the filigree of Raha Javanfar’s discordant violin and some distant drumbeats.
And those same folk influences reach their apogee on the wonderful September Song which rounds off the album, a jaunty, accordion-led number that comes across like a reimagined Fairport Convention, with Romano doing his best Richard Thompson impersonation on guitar, while its lyrics point to the overarching aim behind this ambitious project: “So persistent curiosity refines the covenant/And variation promises to crystallise the constant”.
On Still Life, McHone explored themes of attachment and longing, uncertainty and loss, but there was also a sense on conclusion that “There’s not a lot of resolution”, as she put it at the time. By contrast, with Pentimento, Carson McHone has clearly been on something of a literal and metaphorical journey, and the end point with this album is a more fully realised vision, a project that, in its evolution, shows the full value of collaborating with fellow band members, Outfit; Pentimento is all the richer for it. The somewhat fragmentary nature of the recording, with its spoken word passages, interludes, and poetry – alongside more conventional songs – means it’s an album that demands the listener’s full attention, and is best heard in its entirety for maximum appreciation. Although it may sound organic at times, Pentimento also reveals a level of sophistication that shows there are no real limits to McHone’s ambition.
Pentimento (September 12th, 2025) Merge Records
Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/Pentimento