David Lance Callahan – ‘Island State’ (from ‘Down To The Marshes’ LP)

With ‘Down To The Marshes’ David Lance Callahan continues to explore contemporary issues in ways that are seldom obvious either lyrically or musically. Instead, these are songs that tread the liminal spaces between the boundaries of the extremes encouraged by much of the 21st Century. It makes for a record that sounds recognisably rooted in past traditions yet at the same time contemporary and ageless. Callahan manages this by recognising history’s cycles  and by making his references broad enough to illuminate these reverberations with a visionary elegance that conjures past, present and future within the same moment. In many ways ‘Down To The Marshes’ is not a comfortable record, but it has the sense to measure its solemnity against an earthy warmth that is enormously, endlessly rewarding.