Send "Alela Diane " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 Folk voices come in many hues, from righteous straight-talkers to ethereal sopranos. Now on her third album, Oregon-based Alela Diane musters just the right balance of grit and gossamer. She may have both her husband and her father in her latest band, and semi-retired REM producer Scott Litt on board for this most polished of her albums, but her voice rightly remains the dominant force. The songs? There's nothing world-class here, but you could easily listen to Alela Diane telling you "the wood of the olive is too sacred to burn" ("Elijah") all day....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| A lot has happened in the two years since Alela Diane released her breakout album, the simultaneously imaginative and earthy To Be Still. Among other things, she married her bass player-turned-guitarist, Tom Bevitori, and saw her touring band gel into something a bit more prominent and permanent-- namely, Wild Divine, which includes Bevitori, guitarist Tom Menig (Diane's father), bass player Jonas Haskins, and drummer Jason Merculief. Her third album reflects these developments in its more robust, full-band sound as well as in the writing credits she shares with her husband and father. Musically, Diane sounds more settled on these songs, with the road-tested band bolstering her distinctive vocals and helping to mold her songwriting into slightly more dynamic shapes. In other words, those pesky comparisons to old friend Joanna Newsom no longer apply. Diane trades fraught freak folk for dusty country-rock that recalls the rough-and-tumble outlaw hits of Jessi Colter and Rita Coolidge, if they were backed by the Flying Burrito Brothers. Like those two singers, there's something both slick and scuffed up about Diane's vocals; rather than otherworldly, she sounds deeply rooted in our own world, with a soulful delivery that illuminates the galloping "White Horse" and opener "To Begin". "Heartless Highway" (with its subtle reference to 1970s underground Nashville documentary Heartworn Highways) is a lonely tour song written in Germany, and while there are literally hundreds of songs about this subject, Diane imbues it with a tough-minded homesickness, as if she's working through the heartache to get to the next show. Lyrically, Diane can be just as startling as ever, employing a stream-of-conscious style that bends toward unexpected details or strange turns of phrase. "Amidst the gold, there is dust in every heart," she sings on "Of Many Colors", which is, oddly enough, an ode to her new husband. Her songwriting hasn't lost any of its barbs, so that when she makes a fanfare of the words "There is good, there is still good" on closer "Rising Greatness", it resonates all the more forcefully....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Hailing from Nevada City, Alela Diane played many of her early gigs with fellow native singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom but it's a shame she continues to spend time in Newsom's shadow. In spite of the huge acclaim she received for her debut The Pirate's Gospel (which topped the Rough Trade Shops albums of the year poll) and its equally excellent follow-up To Be Still, she doesn't quite seem to have entered the popular imagination in the way that Newsom undoubtedly has. Diane has her own approach to songwriting of course. Whilst her songs are not quite as epic and allusive as Newsom's, they are no less poetic or evocative. Her voice is characterful but less imposing and quirky and her music more grounded in tradition. Alela Diane & Wild Divine is her first recording with a full, credited backing band and, at least in places, is comfortably the most conventional recording she has made so far. To Be Still had already started an expansion in her sound and had something of an ensemble feel, so this seems a natural further development of that process. Yet it is striking and ironic that the most successful songs here are the most skeletally arranged. The Wind, particularly, is something of a triumph - gentle, yet somehow also dark and dangerous (its key lyric is 'death is a hard act to follow'). A great contributor to the song's ambiguous and hypnotic mood is the presence of slide guitar. The dense narrative of For Elijah, set against a rustling acoustic guitar strum and banjo pluck, is similarly immersive, although it shares a number of melodic and harmonic traits with another great American songwriter, Neko Case. The lyrics on both these songs are characteristically enigmatic - perhaps even obtuse - but they also have a compelling magnetism and emotional richness....full text |
Alela Diane lyrics
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