(2020) Buck Curran - No Love Is Sorrow


Review:
As the world grapples with what music sounds like in the era of quarantine, psychedelic folk guitarist Buck Curran suggests an answer. No Love Is Sorrow, recorded in the COVID-19 hot zone of Bergamo Italy last February is solitary, mournful, full of thought and aching with spiritual yearning. Whether instrumental or with vocals, acoustic or electrically amplified, solo or twined with the voice of Curran’s wife Adele, these songs vibrate with loss and loneliness, but glow with a kind of hope. In an interview with Pitchfork, Curran discussed the existential panic that surrounded him late this winter, as touring revenues and teaching gigs dried up, his wife’s job as a teacher ended and his growing family (one 2 ½ year old, another on the way) had no source of income. Death was everywhere in the small north Italian town he had married into. It would have been easy enough to slip into despair. And yet, as many of us are finding, music still consoles, even now, even when it doesn’t address any of the concrete problems people are facing. And in Curran’s case, it may even do some of that if enough people buy this lovely record. Cuts are balanced, fairly evenly, between improvised instrumentals and more conventionally structured songs. “Blue Raga,” built on a jaunty repetitive riff that evokes Six Organs, gives way to the moody organ-laced textures of “Ghost on the Hill.” The long, shape-shifting title track, with its deep-toned, fat-stringed melody and its agitated middle section fades into the minor key sweetness of “Deep in the Loving Arms,” where Adele Curran leavens a gothic, Wovenhand-ish aura of foreboding. “Oddisea,” one of four cuts to be offered in two distinct versions, has the haunted, sun-shot-through-clouds clarity of vintage Gary Higgins or Jakob Oloffsson. Most of the cuts feature acoustic guitar, but “Django” is all piano and wonderful “War Behind the Sun” plays with ominous, amplified overtones, sounding more like Glenn Jones’ Cul de Sac than his fingerpicked solo work. Four slightly reworked cuts close the album; they aren’t different enough to be necessary, but give you a chance to reappreciate some of No Love Is Sorrow’s strongest material (“Ghost on the Hill,” “Blue Raga,” “Marie” and “Odissea”).





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits