Gillian Welch's long-awaited latest is a great album with timeless appeal. Like this perfectionist's other carefully crafted releases, The Harrow and the Harvest is informed by old conventions, with emphasis on Appalachian folk and the biblical reverence found in Robert Johnson's work. Its unadorned song-craft rests on the strengths of the writing and on the immaculate picking of acoustic guitarist Dave Rawlings—Welch's mirror-image partner. As synchronized as two halves of the same out-of-time soul, this duo has created some of the most hauntingly graceful and darkly lyrical folk music of the last decade and a half.

They seemingly reached the peak of those powers with 2001's modern classic Time (The Revelator), a stunning record that focused on the effects of time through place- and person-specific accounts of its inevitable progression. So successful was that effort that its follow-up, 2003's Soul Journey, faced impossible expectations. That it happens to be the only flawed album Welch and Rawlings have released makes it easy to miss its several standouts (to my mind, that album's "Wrecking Ball" is perhaps the greatest song of the last 10 years). The two supposedly experienced a songwriting drought in the eight years since, and the title of their new album, The Harrow and the Harvest, is meant to reflect this.

Welch's latest is a corrective to the messier, more indulgent Soul Journey, scrapping its intriguing move toward full-band compositions like "Wrecking Ball" and "Wayside/Back in Time." If that's initially disappointing—I contend a record in this mold, divorced from the meandering songs that mired that particular set, could rival anything they've done—the realization that Welch has returned to the minimalist template of her fantastic early diptych (1996's Revival and 1998's Hell Among the Yearlings) and managed in fact to improve upon it in subtle ways, dispels all remorse for what could've been.

Should you gage a Welch/Rawlings record by its timelessness, The Harrow and the Harvest has no equal in their catalogue; each of its ten songs sounds like a lost classic, culled from a bygone era yet crucially relevant today. But there are only originals here; in fact, Welch and Rawlings as a duo have never recorded a cover. The songs are stories of incredible detail ("It was seven years on the burning shore/With gatling guns and paint/Working the lowlands door-to-door"), told through effortless melodies. Each could well be considered a standard-in-the-making, much like Revival's "Orphan Girl" and Yearlings' "Rock of Ages." And true to the record's theme, nearly all of its tracks consider the tenets of hardship and work, and the rewards that can be reaped from time, patience and dedication.

These are also some of the duo's most riveting, vividly told stories. "Dark Turn of Mind," which might be my favorite, summons the dark-heartedness of Hell Among the Yearlings with its haunting refrain: "Some girls are bright as the morning/And some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind." Welch sings it in a lilting croon immediately reminiscent of Time (The Revelator)'s woozily lovesick "Dear Someone," and the song's lament to no one in particular draws a further parallel between the two. More representative of the album's principal theme of perseverance is "Hard Times." Like Bill Callahan's own cart-before-the-horse allegory, "Drover," from his recent album Apocalypse, it's a sensitive dialogue between plowman and cattle, with Rawlings’s harmonizing vocal (in the second and third verses) offering solace to that song's narrator which the narrator in "Dark Turn of Mind" isn't afforded.

Most of the nuances of this set are found in the clean, expressive vocals, the clear-eyed honesty of the lyrics and the songs' deliberately spare backdrops. But on occasion a clever stylistic device enters into the formula, be it the harmonica on "Silver Dagger," the hand-claps-as-horse-hooves on "Six White Horses" or the percussive sound used to punctuate a "knocking at the door" in opener "Scarlet Town." These touches give character and color to songs that arguably haven’t been so pronounced on past Welch and Rawlings recordings. What's most welcome here, however, is a sense of wry humor, a lightness in the face of the ultimately inevitable. I like the way Welch puts it: "That's the way the cornbread crumbles."

Review by:
Sam C. Mac