Gretchen Peters - 'Hello Crual World' LP Review
Grammy nominated country singer Gretchen Peters has been a sonic icon for longer than most of us can say we were alive and on first judgement of this album it's clear that she's lost neither an inkling of lyrical profundity nor musical presence and remains at the forefront of her genre.
Good Bye Cruel World is eleven tracks lauding the the ability of humankind to overcome disaster and find beauty within the disasters we face. Peters' warm honeyed vocals soften the edge, for example, in numbers like the character study Camille, where a gently blown muted trumpet offers shadings of cool, jazz, while in The Matador the earthy maturity of her phrasing injects empathy - a quality whose consistency throughout all of Peters' songs ring true - into a tale about the dark underbelly of love.
Having been bought up in New York and Colorado, Peters then moved to Nashville in the late 1980s where she found work as a songwriter, composing hits for such greats as Martina McBride, Etta James, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, George Strait, as well as for rock singers Neil Diamond and co-writing songs with Bryan Adams. She also won the Country Music Association Song Of The Year award for McBride's Independence Day in 1995. It was not until 1996 that she wrote her debut LP The Secret Of Life and so from the 80's until the present day she made Nashville her home producing four solo albums in her distinctive country/folk fashion.
Her latest Hello Cruel World, an obvious pun on the famous phrase "Goodbye cruel world" displays her true intent and rational behind writing these tunes, that find her heartbreakingly open about the problems she has faced in 2010 such as giving birth to a transgendered baby to the national disasters such as the oil spill that happened virtualy at her doorstep, to the suicide of a close friend.
It is the pain from these events that has been the seed for the beauty of Hello Cruel World with Peters being quoted as saying that "after the trials of the past year I felt raw and open. I wanted to write songs that hurt. I wanted to write songs that were brutally honest. I knew it would be a dark album, and I knew it would be off-putting for some. But I felt I had survived the battering of the natural world and my own interior one for a reason".
Tracks that are symbolic, for to say that any actually standout would be to say that some are better than others, are the test of faith parable St. Francis where the vocals of Peters' backing band add note-for note perfection, while their playing seems at time transparent under the potent magic of Peters' tales like Idlewild, a story plucked from her childhood that uses her parents' unravelling marriage to essay the loss of America's innocence as well as her own. Close listening however will bare yet more fruit in the tempered array of gently interlocked riffs, rhythms and colours that are entirely spellbinding.
It is safe to say that this album, opus would be more suitable a word, is both tragic, heartbreaking yet ultimately triumphant as it lays bare mankind's ability to bridge calamitous disasters and to create such beauty from the process.
As Peters so neatly puts it in the duet Dark Angel (a reflection on spirituality) "There is no hereafter/there is only here/ Life is still a beautiful disaster..." And with such thematic depths to mine wrapped in the skilled artistry and vocals of a veteran singer this is one album that deserves to be among the greats of the country/folk genre if not them all.