William Elliott Whitmore - Hymns for the Hopless
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Artist: William Elliott WhitmoreEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2003-10-07
Music Label: Southern Records
Soundtracks:
- Cold and Dead
- Sometimes Our Dreams Float Like Anchors
- Does Me No Good
- Lord Only Knows
- Pine Box
- From the Cell Door to the Gallows
- Burn My Body
- Our Paths Will Cross Again
Free Music Notes for Hymns for the Hopless
Free Music Review: A compelling and most unusual performer
Hit: 5 Stars
The title of William Elliott Whitmore's debut album and the sound of his voice suit each other perfectly. There is a famous anecdote about Franz Kafka and his friend and literary executor Max Brod. After telling Brod of what little ground there is for we humans to have faith that God means things well for us Brod asked him, "What, is there no hope?" "Oh, there is hope, but not for us." That is exactly what Whitmore's voice and songs sound like. If you could take the spirituality of Casey, the lapsed preacher in Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and cross it with the voice of Tom Waits and Dock Boggs, you get William Elliott Whitmore.
Whitmore is a young man. Hearing him on this album without seeing his photo first you would swear he was a 70-year-old man from Appalachia, his voice lashed by fifty years of drinking moonshine whiskey. Instead, he is several decades younger and a native of Iowa. But he sounds authentic. He sounds like someone singing from the end of their life instead of near the beginning. He is classed as a neotraditionalist and that label fits, but it doesn't prepare you for the grittiness of his voice, the almost gothic eeriness. Add to this a great set of songs and you have a first-rate album indeed. The themes are the ones that you would expect: death, the struggle of living, loss, resignation, a yearning for redemption, and the fear that no redemption is to be had (keep in mind Kafka's "There is hope, but not for us"). The songs are intensely religious though any deity is absent. They contain the experiences that make us yearn for God without God actually being present. Like with bluesman Robert Johnson, the devil spends more time in these songs than Jesus. The tone of the entire album is caught by the title of the first track: "Cold and Dead."
I think this is both the best introduction to Whitmore and his best album. A couple of reviewers prefer his later albums, but I like this more than the two that came later, ASHES TO DUST and SONG OF THE BLACKBIRD. This one is rawer, less polished, and, I think, more original. The two successor albums are both quite excellent and I definitely recommend both of them, but they are very much continuations of this one.
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