Over the Rhine has released holiday records before -- make that Christmas records -- with
Darkest Night of the Year, a recording of a live performance done in a public theater in Cincinnati in 1997. But
Snow Angels is different. It amounts to the second full-length recording
OTR has released in 2007. First came the flawed but nonetheless compelling
Trumpet Child.
Snow Angels, set in the coming winter, deals with seasonal themes of death and rebirth, with the time of the lowest of depressions and the greatest of joys, and results in a profound meditation on the season, on winter, and on what it allows to happen both inside the individual and for the land. It was recorded at a home studio set up in the barn of the pre-Civil War farmhouse that
OTR's two permanent members, Karin Bergquist and
Linford Detweiler, live in.
Detweiler's piano has become the central aspect of
OTR's instrumental sound, and it is especially so here, which is good and proper as it nostalgically recalls notions of family and friends gathering around an upright and singing together. There are few singalongs, though. Most of the songs here are jazzy, introspective tunes framed in Bergquist's ever more astonishing voice. It's because she's an unusually gifted vocalist. Her range is limited and reedy at the top, but that's because she has become a true stylist in her own right. She has studied the greats and it shows. There isn't anything extra in her delivery; her clipped lines on the gorgeous "All I Ever Get for Christmas Is Blue" recall
Billie Holiday and
Betty Carter in their phrasing, but she doesn't have those voices, making it all the more remarkable. Thank God she doesn't give in to the contemporary temptation to sing like
Norah Jones or
Tierney Sutton -- we have enough of those clones already. What's beautiful in this tune is that pervasive feeling of "blue" as this retro-jazz number moves through its paces with simply a piano trio backing her. When she sings gospel on "New Redemption Song," and
Detweiler's piano resonates in its middle and lower registers, the band kicks in behind them as if to underscore the places she's been by the time she opens her mouth.
Brad Jones plays bass and electric guitar, and
Detweiler dubs in a B-3 as well.