reviewing the activity Rhiannon Giddens During these last years, everyone will agree that it has been very intense and has not stopped still for a second. You only have to access its Wikipedia page to realize it. However, beyond all that multi-disciplinary work that has led her, from composing an opera to writing stories for children or doing detailed work on the history of the banjo, what interests her most now is this “You Are The One” that I have in my hands
“You Are The One” It is the artist’s fifth solo album, if we also count the last two albums with her sentimental partner, the Italian Francesco Turrisi. And this time the novelty lies in the fact that it is a work in which, somewhat intentionally, the American artist has sought a certain commercial impact, making an album with a pristine production, in which her voice stands out above the rest of instrumentation and in which everything sounds with clarity sometimes even excessive. Too much white. In addition, to this we must add that she has put the variety of records above the drive, and she has searched for the single in an undisguised way, building a collection of songs that suffer from an evident lack of cohesion.
Thus, in “You Are The One” we can find songs composed by Rhiannon Giddens that at the moment seem like standards of those that have been playing for a lifetime. You only have to listen to a song like the heartbreaking “Another Wasted Life” for the figure of John Barry and his immortal “Goldfinger” played by Shirley Bassey to materialize in your head. But it is that in “Who Are You Dreaming Of” he transports us to vocal jazz, where he seems to pay homage to immortal artists such as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, to immediately transport us to a cabaret show in the French Quarter of New Orleans in “You Put The Place In My Bowl”; to a Kentucky barn to the rhythm of bluegrass in “Way Over Yonder” or to the cajun sound in “You Louisiana Man”. A musical journey that proves what we already knew: that Rhiannon Giddens’ vast musical culture gives her enough expertise to handle any traditional sound, on the spectrum from Ireland to Nashville to every bank of the Mississippi.
We are therefore facing a genre album in which country, blues and soul embrace each other, which becomes more interesting when the song is less faithfully submitted to a genre. Thus, the best of the album resides precisely in those songs of a somewhat more personal nature such as the one that gives the album its title or that fantastic duel with Jason Isbell in “Yet To Be”. Evidence that, to a certain extent, makes us yearn for the work that the artist herself achieved in an album like “Freedom Highway” (Nonesuch, 17) that revolved around what it has meant and means to be a black mother in the United States. A concept that gave a unit of criteria to the different musical textures that ran through the album, which is exactly what this “You Are The One” suffers from.
You’re The One de Rhiannon Giddens