pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog — music . media . web. culture

Alela Diane has always struck me as a child of Civil War-era America who figuratively wanders across a modern world that is deaf to her ministrations. The Woman Who Fell To Earth. She sings not of what is but everything “that has been”; she’s a messenger channeling the past.

“There are things that I have seen in my head…” are the first words sung on her wonderful new album ‘To Be Still.’ These things she sees are all around us but Alela sees them through an ancient lens. On ‘White As Diamonds’ when she sings of how “our lives are buried in snow” it is a lament that is not necessarily auto-biographical yet still feels like a cry for help. Another line “a glimpse of what has been…” is a metaphor that runs throughout all of her work – she has always sung of rivers, streams, mountains, trees, strong hands, the skeletons of leaves; charades, torn and stained lace, waters of all forms that clean love’s loss, of siren’s tombs – all sung with such longing and a crystal clarity.

Where her previous album, ‘The Pirate’s Gospel,’ had a rich and dark gothic feel to it, ‘To Be Still’ has careful country overtones that remind me of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest.’ And Diane’s voice as always is a miracle – pure, lilting cadences that deliver clear lines of yearning never leaving the listener feeling low; as with gospel music all doubts are aimed upward to a higher being and the results are uplifting and spiritual.

Home is a rock on the title track ‘To Be Still.’ The end of the trail where wanderings cease for a time, where perhaps love waits – “oh it’s here at home where I’ll wait for your wanders to be still” – but Diane also suggests that home can be a prison – “there’s a wolf inside the cave, and another in the clouds, I’ve seen them chew at night on the shadows in your eyes.” To this man who wanders and may have sinned, she offers up forgiveness before forgiveness is required with a take on don’t ask, don’t tell when she sings “and I won’t trail my feet in whatever dirt you track in,” and goes on to suggest that love is a gift, the “crock of gold that is not far from the snow” which returns us neatly to her theme of “our lives are buried in snow.”

The hope of rebirth and regeneration is scattered everywhere throughout the album, none more so than on ‘Take Us Back’ – “meet me where the snowmelt flows, it is there my dear where we will meet again.” Ironically ‘To Be Still’ is full of voices like that, voices that are never still – the callings are many. In religious terms these lyrical callings sit alongside the doomsday scenario known as End Times but Diane escapes the shackles of religious puritanism always flying free even as her songs suggest that the modern world denies nature. Nature always takes its course in Diane’s world.

Still, religion may have its place. When she sings, “the strength of water can sink a man,” does she mean the raging currents of snowmelt or the lifelong scars of baptism? She who has wandered for an eternity could answer that question and it would be up to us all to listen.

Diane works magic as she channels these lyrics especially with recurring water themes. Water is everywhere, it is tidal, it drowns, it rushes, it cleanses and purifies. It brings to mind Dylan, not Bob but Dylan Thomas and Dylan Ail Don of ancient celtic myth wherein “Dylan comes in contact with his baptismal waters, he plunges into the sea and takes on characteristics of a sea creature, moving through the seawater as perfectly as any fish, thus earning his epithet, Eil Ton ‘the son of the wave’.”

Alela Diane’s ‘To Be Still’ is a lyrical masterpiece, a body of work that is as restless as the sea.

‘To Be Still’ is released on Rough Trade on Feb 17 2009.

Alela Diane – White As Diamonds