South Carolina’s most unique musical export for decades now, Danielle Howle has had previous brushes with the music business to no avail, at least in terms of popular success. Musically, she’s always charted her own passage through bands, labels, and the ups and downs of life as a nearly starving musician. That her spirit remains intact and has matured into the masterful artistic voice that it is could be construed as a minor miracle, but we’re the ones who marvel at her resilience.
Back on a nationally distributed record label for the first time in a decade, Howle doesn’t take the opportunity to ‘kitchen sink’ the production on **Current;* in fact it’s quite the opposite effect. She is backed by a spare combo featuring Josh Roberts on guitar, Kerry Brooks on bass, and some tasty accordion licks courtesy of Tony Lauria from Spottiswoode and His Enemies along with percussion via several players including Jim Brock and Eric Rickert. The resulting sound should be comfortingly familiar to anyone who’s seen her play a solo, duo, or trio show over the past few years. After so many different experiments and arrangements of her music, this simple approach really seems to suit her, and her songs, the best.
There are moments when she drifts into sounds that are unusual in her own repertoire, such as “How Is Rain,” where she manages to channel Nina Simone via Joni Mitchell in service to a bossa nova beat. More often, however, she’s a product of her own unique muse. It combines close to the bone lyricism with a folk singer’s unaffected, authentic voice, informed by the same kind of blues and country strains that produced similarly difficult to categorize artists from Bonnie Bramlett to Maggie Bell, Susan Tedeschi and Dayna Kurtz.
The album opens with the strummed blast-off statement of existence in the face of adversity “Live Through” and closes with a new take of a song she’s released before, the fan favorite country weeper, “While I Miss You.” In between, she wrangles a near-Tejano “I’m Alright,” (the turn of a phrase chorus adds, “Don’t get me wrong,” in true country music fashion), conducts what sounds like a personal reassessment of her own career in the swaying, reflective “Back In The Sun” (When I’m stumbling past the humblin, past the crumblin in the world…”), and pays Tom Petty a visit with a gothic, bluesy version of “Southern Accents” that’s so perfect for her that it barely sounds like a cover tune.
The songwriting centerpiece, however, might be the intense, surrealistic “Damage Appears On The Frame.” It hearkens back to her earlier, simpler work when she was trying to fit too many words in too small a musical space, but with the benefit of years of experience she’s now able to spill her thoughts in a cascade of emotions and imagery, as her voice gets stronger and more overwrought until the final lines:
“My friends we’re laughing and joking, at last it takes aim, how slowly the damage appears on the frame.”
It’s one of those songs that could mean different things to different listeners, so I’ll refrain from coloring the page with my own interpretation here and just note that it hits home for this aging music fan, just as this album should hit all the right sweet spots for fans of acoustic folk/country/Americana/whatever that is.
Listen to the Album
– Kevin Oliver
