Eliza Gilkyson
Album: The Nocturne Diaries
Label: Red House
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.elizagilkyson.com

Eliza's first studio album since Roses At The End Of Time (three years ago) is a collection of excellent new songs that's predominantly restless and contemplative in character, songs she describes as "personal reflections that the night-time inspired", for "the songs that come in the night are very different than the daylight songs" and are inspired by the converging forces of your highest hopes and darkest fears, illuminating the big themes such as mortality and the plight of mankind with the experiences and attitudes of the loving people who share life with you.

However dark its themes at times, The Nocturne Diaries delivers some of the most beautiful music I've heard this year, with subtly textured, musically rich and brilliantly judged accompaniment courtesy of trusty folks like Mike Hardwick, Ray Bonneville, Warren Hood and Rich Brotherton, and vocal harmonies by Lucy Kaplansky, Eliza's daughter Delia Castilio and her son and co-producer Cisco Ryder. There's an elegantly sensuous layered sound giving a pervasive atmosphere of the opening song Midnight Oil, which evokes the almost dreamlike creative process of writing in the cold heat of night, whereas the ensuing Eliza Jane is a jaunty, bouncy country-folky number that takes a wry stance at one's tendency to dwell on the bleaker aspects of events. No Tomorrow is a glowingly tender waltzer of a love-song, powered by soft electric guitar and keening fiddle, while World Without End deceptively gently ponders mankind's refusal to connect with the truths of mortality and potential disaster. Some lovely old-time style autoharp strumming informs the gorgeous, distinctively Carter-Family-inspired Touchstone, while in contrast The Red Rose And The Thorn, which Eliza dubs a sort-of "Hendrix-meets-Rumi-spiritual-quest-for-the-beloved", features some uncharacteristic, but brilliantly focused crashing electric guitar work. The musical settings are uncannily suited to the lyrics for the most part, although perhaps that of An American Boy proves a touch easygoing, even mundane for its stark portrait of an adolescent shooter on the verge of a rampage.

Aside from the co-write of the final track All Right Here (with Danish songwriter Jens Lysdal), Eliza's responsible for all the album's lyrics with the exception of Where No Monument Stands, a John Gorka setting of a poem by William Stafford, and Fast Freight, a revisit of a song written in the 1950s by Eliza's father Terry. The Nocturne Diaries is certainly one of Eliza's finest collections to date, delivering songs with strong melodies, each one intense and memorable whatever its emotional climate, and each adorned with a warm, uncannily apt instrumental backdrop.

David Kidman