Joan of Arctic
Louisville singer-songwriter decamps to Iceland.
Joan Shelley ★★★★ Like The River Loves The Sea NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP
SIX GORGEOUS albums into her traditionalmusic-flavoured career, Joan Shelley of Louisville, Kentucky felt the call away from her homeland to Iceland. She’d read that it sat on a bubbling fault line above the Atlantic, an ocean spreading by an inch every year, pushing Europe and America apart. Wanting to take in what that meant, drink in its otherworldly landscape and see her music from a discombobulating distance, Shelley decamped to Reykjavik for a week with longterm collaborator, guitarist James Elkington, and Icelandic engineer Albert Finnbogason (he shared the pair’s love of strong coffee and Abba string arrangements). Like The River Loves The Sea is the stunning result of that time together, and, in Shelley’s words, of “a longing born of all the dividing… a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times.”
From 2010’s self-released By Dawnlight onwards, Shelley’s musical reach has been expanding impressively. Her last album, 2017’s Jeff Tweedy-produced Joan Shelley, arrived like a lost ’70s classic, its songs reflecting the deep, melancholy mood of her Rembrandt-like profile on its cover. A 2018 EP, Rivers & Vessels, proved her talents more than a match for her duetting partner, neighbour and long-term friend Will Oldham. Shelley’s voice is at the heart of all these projects: effortless and unaffected, like the very best in folk music, but also warmly felt, as if profound messages and meanings are being dredged up from her marrow.
Newcomers to Shelley might find this LP too quiet and dawdling initially, but it’s a record for close acquaintance as it immerses the listener in intimate landscapes and shifting seasons. Take the track Teal: describing a “cool, dark space” where the protagonist goes when she feels short with her lover, she later tries “to tear apart summer’s stuffy and stale rooms”, then introduces “the fresh air, the wind and waves”. At every turn of temperature, we’re there with her.
Shelley and Elkington’s empathetic arrangements help these moving songs along. Cycle tells an affecting drama of a lover who arrives late (“beamed into the sympathies that you no longer have”) before a shiver of violins arrive, suggesting spine-tingling emotions. On When What It Is, piano passages slowly clash and unravel with the guitars, as if worlds are tilting. Some songs deliver harsher blows, like The Fading, showing how gleefully culpable we can be for the messes we make in our world: “I saw the river thick with mud, break through the banks and run,” Shelley sings, before turning, “I confess I liked it/I cheered the flood when the water hit the walls and won.”
This album engages our minds while it explores, but as it raises questions, it still comforts. “If this shelter holds…sing me a song,” Shelley sings on Awake, with particular tenderness. On this form, we’ll long be asking her to return that favour.