| Dustedmagazine |
 Sam Amidon refers to the process of adapting the traditional Irish and Appalachian folk songs on his albums as “recomposing”. He keeps the vocals and melodies the same, but comes up with his own chords and rhythm. His new album, I See the Sign (like his previous, All is Well), also adds string and piano compositions from Nico Muhly onto the skeletal folk arrangements. Every song bears evidence of careful, meticulous updating, and while Amidon and Muhly jettison most of the original arrangements, there’s great respect for the source material. (Even the one recent song, R. Kelly’s “Relief,” is adapted as an inspirational sing-along.)
Balancing his new arrangements with the original is not Amidon’s only challenge: There’s also the matter of giving listeners a way into the album, to keep it from being a distant, museum-quality piece of work. He pulls this off well; “You Better Mind,” a duet with Beth Orton, shows his pop sensibility, built on a repeating guitar line and a simple, memorable chorus. At other times, he and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson rely on intimate production work. The traditional “Climbing High Mountains” appears at first to contain little more than Amidon’s crystal clear vocals and guitar; the horn, string and piano are mixed in such a subtle fashion that it takes a while to appreciate the complexity of the song. And finally, he experiments with some more challenging structures. The title track, for instance, has a languid stop-start rhythm that actively resists falling into any kind of distinct, “pretty” melody. The closing “Red” also never quite finds a tempo, although the repetition of a single spiritual lyric (“Found my lost sheep”) makes it stirring in an eerie kind of way....full text |
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| Spin |
| It's been more than a decade since Moby reinvented vintage field recordings as space-age nightclub blues. Sam Amidon works similarly quirky alchemy here, reinventing public-domain songs (plus one modern-day ringer) as rustic mood music for watching distant super-novas explode. But the results have none of the musty aftertaste such a description implies, contrasting pretty sounds with violent lyrical undercurrents. The one contemporary song, R. Kelly's "Relief," fits perfectly alongside oldies from the Georgia Sea Island Singers, even sounding a prayerful note....full text |
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| Cokemachineglow |
Sam Amidon’s third album, I See the Sign, opens on the least folk-friendly moment of his career. A picked banjo pattern and Amidon’s vocal melody is at the center of “How Come That Blood,” picking up in some ways where his appearance on Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue (2008) left off; but neither the repetitive picking nor Amidon’s muted voice hits first. Instead, it’s the stabbing bass, the strings swooping inward for only a few seconds at a time, the bleeping synthesizer, and the loping percussion that control the song. In essence, Amidon’s core performance is merely a vehicle for the surrounding ornamentation, and it works surprisingly well. It sets up the tension between the often gentle voice and its malevolent surroundings, and this, his third collection of re-arranged traditionals, oscillates between the sweet and the almost apocalyptic, often to great success.
Amidon’s collaborators play a major role in this, from Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson to vocalists Shahzad Ismaily and Beth Orton: the ensemble renders these songs far more compelling than Amidon’s interpretations alone would have been. More often than not, the duos—Amidon and Orton or Amidon and Ismaily—sing in unison, but the duets, especially “I See the Sign,” sound far more unhinged and unstable because of Ismaily’s contributions and the slight stereo pans that further destabilize the arrangements. When Orton appears on “You Better Mind,” she gives Amidon’s performance a religious fervor. On “Johanna the Row-Di,” it’s the increasingly out of phase, misplaced harmonies that prove the song’s greatest asset....full text |
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