Categories : Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 5 / 5 Reviewer: Michelle Kennedy |
As summer approaches music blogs explode with promises of “hot summer” releases, hype machines overheat and explode. Suddenly it’s very easy for a whole slew of excellent albums to get lost in the shuffle of big bass-y noise and Lady Gaga’s new video. Justin Rutledge’s The Early Widows is one of those excellent albums. Rutledge, Canada’s sexiest troubadour, has penned the best album of the first half of the year and if his spot on the Polaris Prize long-list is any predictor The Early Widows will win out as one of the best albums of 2010.
The Early Widows is a stunningly beautiful moment in Canadian music. Each note is perfect; each lyric feels necessary and ripe with emotional honesty. In the epic ‘Islands,’ Rutledge acknowledges deep regret, “While the man you thought I could be lives in a book you read”; ‘Turn Around’ is full of all the contradictions and stunning clichés of broken hearts. He honours the pain of loss but ultimately longs for nothing save for one last look.
Even more than Rutledge’s stellar songwriting are the interesting relationships he has cultivated on this album. Given Hawksley Workman’s propensity for ostentatious songwriting and a stage presence soaked in hyper-sexualized bravado, he seems an odd choice to produce this subtle beauty, and yet somehow this collaboration is near perfect. Rutledge softens Workman’s aesthetic while Workman pulls out all the stops for Rutledge: choirs, horn sections and a loving focus on Rutledge’s cool, crisp voice. The other far more staggering collaboration is the beautiful opening track co-written with Canadian literary hero, Michael Ondaatje. But it makes perfect sense: both men write about love and loss with an almost fetishistic observance. Both are deeply committed to language and the search for the perfect word to define a moment. ‘Be a Man’ balks at the hyper masculine ideal of a man and longs for a gentleness and hope. “Being a man,” they seem to say, “means falling in love and loving completely.”
The Early Widows is a love song, a goodbye to a history of broken hearts, a poetic treatise about cottage country; and the perfect music for long goodbyes, glorious hellos, cool grey days, hot summer nights or the deepest colds of a Canadian winter.
