Rawlings sings a lower harmony line, the way John Lennon often did, and he likes intervals and passing tones that are closer than customary, so there are elements of near dissonance and plainsong. Their voices are oddly similar, not as close as the Everly Brothers, but very close. They don’t complement each other so much as they blend as if they had a chemical affinity. They have said that during unison passages in “The Way It Will Be” that they sometimes lose track of whose voice is whose. Rawlings is a solid and straightforward singer of his own material, but as an accompanist he has no peer, except perhaps Art Garfunkel. At least no one else but Garfunkel has as completely imagined the accompanying line or taken as much care in inventing one.

The ten songs on the “Harrow & the Harvest” unfold like a novel, or like a collection of stories in which the character is roughly the same. Welch’s liking is for narrators who have weathered hardship and have a steely spine and are commenting on what happened to them, or describing the ordeal. They don’t elaborate or ramble particularly. They have brooded on what they have to say for long enough, or are recalling it from a sufficient enough distance that the unessential things have fallen away. Their remarks are dense and rich more than minimal. Her character’s theology is unadorned. Life is a trial, God punishes, and mansions await in heaven, but the cemetery is never far from sight. Her capacity to suffuse melodies with precise feelings and power, to flood them, really, is rare. Her cast of mind is melancholy and pagan. “Scarlet Town,” the opening song, is about a terrible kind of Deep South town where the residents accept the things that happen as logical, but they unnerve a stranger. It is the kind of place where the inhabitants would gather to watch a house or a barn burn. From a grievance, or the desire to do harm, or the mere wish to watch a spectacular event, one of them would probably have set it aflame, and no one would do very much to help put it out.

In “Dark Turn of Mind” there is a line, “I see the bones in the river,” which has the startling effect of enlarging the narrator’s character the way views sometimes open up when one comes over a rise. The narrator is possibly a sorceress of a kind who has visions, or a simple woman describing the remnant of a long-ago murder, or is haunted by a metaphor she can’t quite unwrap. She is talking about the past, or she is delivering a prophecy. It is possible to extend the thread of imagination a long way on the matter, but the stimulating effect is characteristic of Welch’s shrewd and calculated and incantatory use of plain language.

Rawlings is the most original guitar player of his generation. (His older stylistic cousin, for singularity, is Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, who uses the guitar in a sleek, syncopated, almost knifelike way, offering cunning contrapuntal lines to the chord changes, as if he were a pianist in a jazz quartet.) Rawlings plays an old arch top guitar, not a fancy one, which has a tinny sound, like bells. His playing, which relies on chromatic scales and open strings and alterations of the instrument’s range by means of a capo, is sure and inspired. No guitarist at the moment is more immediately recognizable. Welch’s first instrument was the drums, and she plays second guitar with great rhythmic assurance.

The years it took to write these songs are evident in their deeply refined form. No word is superfluous, and no note is, either. No effort is made for effect, so the effect, as refined as it is, is powerful. Their music is close to being like the confirmation of a mathematical theory—it has that kind of elegance and precision. Although it is has many antique references, it is as modern as any music I can think of, if one’s definition of modern includes the idea of something not heard in such a form before, and something distinctive enough not to be included with other forms.

The record finishes in a spiral of ascension, as if to a room in a house where the fire is burning and it is night. Or, alternatively, the fire is out, and the door is open, and the night sky presses against the windows.

(Photograph: Reuben Cox)

Source:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/gillian-welch-the-harrow-and-the-harvest.html