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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Land
of Milk and Honey
Artist: Eliza Gilkyson Label: Red House Records Length: 10 tracks All is not well in the Land of Milk and Honey. Eliza Gilkyson has given us an astonishingly acute and accusing commentary at the state of the world in 2004. The shadow cast across humanity and particularly Gilkyson’s land of milk and honey, America, as a result of the Iraq War has disturbed her peace and she decides to nail her theses to the door. It can be quite a challenge to have a message to share and especially one so socio/politically enflamed and have to then squeeze it into an economy of lyric never mind melodies that don’t come across all contrived and as subtle as an articulated truck. Well Gilkyson has achieved a remarkable feat of songwriting by taking the heaviest issues in the cosmos and allowing them to float like a feather descending compassionately around Forrest Gump. There is wealth of American women writing good songs but there are a few writing great ones and Gilkyson sits alongside the Patti Griffin’s, the Catie Curtis’s et al at the top of the tree. And heavy it is. Beginning with a go at the war for oil ("Hiway 9") it an album littered with sinners and the lonely and the criminal in ways personal, national and international. In it all the judgement is constantly caressing and colliding with mercy and love. As she lays out the darkness around us and our children at this point in history there is still an abundance of hope and little flashes of light that twinkle almost all the brighter for their context. It sets out on "Hiway 9" trucking towards a war for oil and finds its destination in a relatively unknown Woody Guthrie song "Peace Call" with the help of Patti Griffin, Iris Dement and Mary Chapin Carpenter. In between we have a song entitled "Tender Mercies" inspired by the cover photograph of a young boy diving into a smelting plant waste pool near the Kosova/Albania border and adds a verse about the suicide bomber before turning horrendous, violent and futile war and terrorism into a mother prayer for her child. There is "Ballad of Yvonne Johnston" who is using her song as a confession from prison for the murder that she committed as a mother protecting her children form the obscene sex abuse that ruined her life. It is a prayer for forgiveness and yearning to make amends and somehow to awaken us all up to see how we are destroying ourselves as a species. The title track is written in traditional hymnal form with a piano led church choir effect. It is as poignant a prophecy as you will hear and none will be more beautiful. It is a woman weeping at the wayward world and how each of us are foolish mortals who:
Sacrifice love’s mystery
Steve Stockman 3/29/2004
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