Rayna Gellert
Album: Old Light: Songs From My Childhood And Other Gone Worlds
Label: StorySound
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.raynagellert.com

Rayna's background is in mountain and string band music, and she's been hitherto best known as the powerful fiddle player with the band Uncle Earl (with whom she's also been known to sing a bit too on rare occasions), while her father Dan has long been celebrated within the old-time music community for his banjo playing. As it turns out, Dan drops in to contribute to a couple of tracks on this, Rayna's first solo project, along with a rather impressive roll-call of guest musicians (Nathan Salsburg, Andrew Heller, Jon Estes, Jeff Keith, Kevin Kehrberg, Jamie Dick, Rick Good, Kai Welch and harmony vocalists Alice Gerrard, Abigail Washburn, Leah Abramson and Scott Miller).

But it's still Rayna's own striking presence - here most notably her intense and intimate singing voice, for she only brings the fiddle out of its case for three of the songs - that provides the disc with its tremendous, and truly special, musical identity, on an originally conceived and imaginatively assembled programme that intriguingly interleaves fresh arrangements of five traditional ballads with five insightfully melancholy - and believe me, seriously beautiful - new songs of Rayna's own devising that take as their central theme the mystery of memory and its intense impact on our lives, with a key emphasis on its intrinsic unreliability (an interesting and illuminating angle for someone who like Rayna is so steeped in tradition and thus relies heavily on the collision between cultural and personal memory). The questioning, metaphysical disc opener, Nothing, has an air of familiarity both in melody and lyric, that's at once comforting and strangely disquieting as Rayna explores the mystical contradictions that memory brings. The thread continues through In The Ocean, an evocative and tearful remembrance of a lost love (its chorus itself directly mirroring the words of a traditional ballad, Young Emily), and The Platform, where Rayna tries to make sense of someone else's memory and recognition. The various aspects of memory, recognition and personal identity finally all come together in the heartbreaking Fly To Me.

The haunting coexistence of traditional with contemporary soundscape (which embraces creatively weird, unearthly-sounding touches like moog guitar and what sounds like an ebow) brings that spooky memory connection even further to the fore, as does the sonic thread that binds the traditional and the original, a thread delicately interwoven with Rayna's richly toned voice and Nathan's ultra-distinctive, richly textured yet finely-graded guitar work. These uniquely piquant resonances form an integral element in the gorgeous audio backdrop that permeates the purely traditional songs, which furnish several of the album's highlights: the scary tale of The Cruel Mother is given an almost obscenely lush string-sodden arrangement, whereas in complete contrast the gospel-flavoured Lamplighting Time benefits from a simple and tellingly sparse yet inventive guitar setting. The Fatal Flower Garden takes on the mantle of an almost psychedelic playground sing-song, while the potently drawn reminiscence of 1845 really feels like it's being carried on down through the pages of the ages in Rayna's keenly felt rendition.

This is a really extraordinary album, and one of the finest I've heard that combines contemporary writing with deep tradition in an informed and genuinely original way.

David Kidman