Patty Griffin
Album: Servant Of Love
Label: Thirty Tigers
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.pattygriffin.com

Patty's tenth album comes as something of a surprise even to this reviewer who's avidly followed her career over much of the past decade and a half. Each successive album has been acclaimed as something of a landmark within the Americana genre, notwithstanding observance of the accepted conventions of singer-songwriterdom.

American Kid, which came out a couple of years ago, was a celebration of her then-recently-deceased father; since the release of that album, Patty's broken up with Robert Plant (within the ranks of whose Band Of Joy she'd been performing), and this experience has informed both the writing and often stark, always boldly conceived ambience of Servant Of Love. Its sound world is very intense, the imagery of Patty's writing shot through with a vulnerability that nevertheless displays a resilience and a distinct feeling that she'll be coming out the other side much stronger as well as wiser. The modal settings of several of the songs serve to accentuate the meditative qualities and profound, almost metaphysical concerns of Patty's emotional journey, with a strong sense of catharsis that's second nature to the expression of her thoughts and feelings.

Patty's stated references to transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and mystical poets Rumi and Rilke make perfect sense, although the listener doesn't necessarily need to embrace or have prior knowledge of these connections to appreciate the import of Patty's honest lyrics, which are firmly grounded in the essence of life itself. Right from the opening song (the title track), with its desperately bleak piano figure, Patty casts a spell that doesn't release its hold for one moment over the disc's 52-minute span - which is an extraordinary achievement in this age of goldfish sound-bite culture.

Patty's passionate vocal delivery is brilliantly complemented by the responsive and supportive instrumental settings - individually-etched timbres of muted jazz trumpet and slide or twang guitar take their proud place in the texture, from the raunchy grunge of Gunpowder to the elemental slide-and-marimba-infused country-blues ululations of Good And Gone; the grinding soulful electric defiance of Hurt A Little While to the desperate gothic balladry of 250,000 Miles with its clamouring, driven eastern-inflected backing; the plaintive, delicate and gorgeously harmonised Made Of The Sun to the numbed mbira-bedecked stasis of Everything's Changed. On There Isn't One Way Patty rails against selfishness, then feels her personal fragility reflected in the cautiously underplayed Noble Ground.

The depth of feeling in the sparse, pleadingly intimate vox-and-piano ballad You Never Asked Me is almost unbearably emotionally conveyed, although its apparent nihilism may well turn out to be deceptive, especially in the light of the following song, the quietly optimistic album closer Shine A Different Way. For after all, love persists - and somehow, often against all the odds, survives on through to live another day. Songwriting aside, and on a purely musical basis, I can't help remarking that Patty's time with Plant must've made quite an impression, for not only is there a strong world-blues-roots feel about much of the music on this album but to my mind the driving acoustic guitar riff of Snake Charmer seems to've come straight out of Bron-y-Aur Stomp. Whatever, Servant Of Love is an exceptional album, even by Patty's exacting standards: an astoundingly fine collection of songs with a very strong identity that will stand the test of time.

David Kidman