Alison Krauss & Union Station
NEW FAVORITE
(ROUNDER)

Alison Krauss has a talent for mixing the spare acoustic colors of bluegrass with a winning pop sensibility. It’s more than the utter sweetness of her cotton-soft vocal melodies on numbers like " I’m Gone " and " Crazy Faith " that makes this combination work. The depth of her musicianship and her band’s seamless ensemble playing allow her to juxtapose the propulsion of old-time mountain music with expansive, contemporary-sounding beds of texture deftly crafted from the basics of electric guitar, dobro, mandolin, and her own expert fiddle.

Krauss’s last album, 1998’s Forget About It, was a solo disc; New Favorite is a full-on ensemble effort. Dan Tyminski, Union Station’s guitarist/mandolinist and George Clooney’s singing voice in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, gets a few lead-vocal turns, and that adds to the spirit of community. His sharp Southern accent and hard vowel pronunciations bristle with rural sensibility. And Krauss — like Dolly Parton in recent years — has gone back to her music’s bedrock for this disc’s prevalent themes. Most songs are updates of the dark ballads about loss of love and faith that are the soul of the music of the Appalachian and Smoky mountains, the sad tales impoverished people once passed back and forth on banjo and fiddle in hard-luck mining towns and lost-hollow hamlets. Yet there’s a modern sensuality to numbers like " Crazy Faith " and the warm come-on " Let Me Touch You for a While. " All of which makes this a fine and timeless recording.

Issue Date: October 18 - 25, 2001