2024 Glitterhouse
gatefold sleeve
still sealed
clear vinyl
Uncuts Album of the month:
"The title of Eckman’s new album suggests some vague kinship with Woody Guthrie, but The Land We Knew The Best is hardly an album of dustbowl ballads, songs about hard lives in a hard country. There’s a shack or farmhouse on the cover, but the landscape is European, a hint of tundra beyond the mountains. So it’s not a letter home, either, a requiem for the America that Eckman left behind, written in exile. Rather, it’s a collection of interior monologues, essays in contrition, apology, enough regret in these songs to flood a valley. “Somehow I missed the memo that said when you reach breaking point, you just say stop…” Eckman sings on the confessional “Haunted Nights”, an attempt to explain ruinous behaviour, the tendency of some people to only be happy when the house is burning down around them, the temple walls collapsing, self-destruction as a default setting.
Where The Spirit Rests was sometimes inhospitably stark, occasionally just Eckman’s voice and guitar. The Land We Knew The Best has an altogether warmer, more inviting sound, played out mostly on piano, acoustic guitars, double bass, violin, some pedal steel, subliminal strings, arranged by Belgian composer Catherine Graindorge, who’s done similar jobs for Nick Cave and Iggy Pop. If much of Where The Spirit Rises sounded like it had come from a small, airless room, “Guinevere”, the opening track here, is the sound of a window being opened to let in a warm nostalgic breeze.
Like Dave Alvin’s unbearably poignant “From A Kitchen Table”, the song is a letter, a message to a long-gone love to come, finally, home, to take “the wild chance we never got”. Things will be better this time. “My mind burns different now,” Eckman sings in his raspy end-times voice.
“Town Lights Fade” aspires to the same kind of reassurance. “The rage is gone, and the fear has calmed,” Eckman sings over a dreamy melody, pixilated percussion, an electric guitar like a sudden shaft of sunlight illuminating a better idea of the world. Scything viola brings a vagabond Celtic swirl to “Running Hot”, a defiant porch stomper about rehabilitation and resurrection. “From these flatlands we will rise,” Eckman intones. “Mountain tops got stars for eyes.” The exhilarating “Buttercup” adds an irresistible motorik backbeat to the mix. “Laments” is a slow, smouldering thing, something simmering on a stove, hints of classic Crazy Horse in the gathering musical storm. Four minutes in, the track is finally handed over to the guitars that have been threatening to overwhelm it and finally do, albeit a little too briefly. One of the album’s highlights, “Haunted Nights” is an unfolding of painful memories, a catalogue of broken things, heartbreakingly set to Andraz Mazi’s mournful pedal steel, Slovenian singer-songwriter Jana Beltram adding beautifully hushed backing vocals. “The Cranes” is ominous, brooding, flocks of migrating birds appearing through a low mist, a possibly bleak omen. Delivered with the elegant intimacy of vintage Leonard Cohen, “Last Train Home” is a hymnal finale that perhaps returns the singer to thoughts of Genevieve, still missing from his life, kept close now only in memories of her touch, her taste, her kisses, a postcard of a “skyline in August” sent from somewhere with her love. Beltane’s spectral voice, fading into a final silence, is the last thing you hear on a remarkable album about loss, forgiveness, rebuilding a life from ruin, maybe the best thing Eckman’s put his name to."
