Susan McKeown & Lindsey Horner - Through the Bitter Frost and Snow
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Susan McKeown & Lindsey HornerEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1997-10-14
Music Label: 1-800 Prime CD
Soundtracks:
- Through the Bitter Frost and Snow
- Winter King
- When All the Songs Were Sad
- Green Grow'th the Holly
- Bold Orion
- Song of Forgetting
- Christ Child
- Dun O?che ?d I Mbeithil
- All Hallows
- Coventry Carol
- There Is No Rose
- Auld Lang Syne
- I Sing of a Maiden
Free Music Notes for Through the Bitter Frost and Snow
Free Music Review: This is among my favorite christmas cds
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a great album. McKeown, accompanied principally by upright bassist / backing vocalist Lindsey Horner, have produced a bittersweet ode to the christmas season. The music has a melancholy reflective of the "bitter frost and snow," and the lack of sunlight, of the winter season. And yet, "through" the melancholy (as the title implies), there is a warmth and a smile that reminds you of blazing yule log, christmas lights, a hot cup of egg nog or buttered rum, and friends and family huddled together.
In some ways it pairs well with the Chieftain's christmas opus, The Bells of Dublin. This one is a little more jazzy, think perhaps of Vince Guaraldi-esque wandering basslines. I'm not going to do a song-for-song breakdown, because I think the album has such a great flow that the whole composition is greater even than the individual numbers.
I hope you enjoy this christmas cd as much as I do.
Through the Bitter Frost and Snow Poster
This thematic collection of songs about winter and Christmas finds McKeown beginning to realize the potential that peeked out at irregular intervals on her last full-length effort (Bones, Prime CD PCD-027). Now that the focus is primarily on her voice and on the muscular but sensitive bass playing of Lindsey Horner, things are a bit lighter and jazzier, especially on "Winter King" and the lovely "Bold Orion," which includes an out-of-place but strangely satisfying electric guitar solo. "Green Grow'th the Holly" is a 15th-century English Christmas song that McKeown delivers in gorgeous multi-tracked three-part harmony. But the album's centerpiece is the stark and beautiful voice-and-bass rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" that had NPR's phones ringing off the hook when McKeown and Horner performed it during a New Year's Eve broadcast. This is a perfect disc to play while sitting by the fire with a loved one on a frigid winter night-not because it's romantic, exactly,! but because it lets you feel alternately the severity of winter and the warmth of the Christmas season's promise, all without leaving your living room. A remarkable album. - Rick AndersonAnyone who lives in snow country can appreciate the stark but fascinating landscapes Susan McKeown and Lindsey Horner conjure up in this jazzy folk-rock amalgam that traverses the stars ("Bold Orion") and the biting solitary expanses of the title track. Still there's an uncanny warmth and longing in the voices, the truncated harmonies, and the resonating bass line, the bass often serving as a lead instrument in "Song for Forgetting," for example. McKeown and Horner have managed to create a highly distinctive record of wintry exploration that mixes traditional British Isles folk singing and jazz phrasing while embracing familiar fare such as "Coventry Carol," "Auld Lang Syne" (almost dirgelike), and "Green Grow'th the Holly." No stranger to melancholy, the record will have a disquieting affect. But it will also please and intrigue with its bittersweet sadness and ironic arrangements for anyone willing to acquire such a beguiling taste of the dark month of Christmas. --Martin Keller
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