Anais Mitchell - Young Man in America reviews
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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
| Guardian |
 Anais Mitchell's Hadestown was a major gear-shift for the singer-songwriter, a wildly ambitious folk-jazz-blues opera that brought out the best in her. So it's hard to approach this follow-up without a certain anxiety. Sure enough, the first listen is sufficiently deflating that you wonder whether it was everything peripheral to Mitchell – not least Michael Chorney's vivid arrangements – that made Hadestown so great. With more listens, however, the beneficial effect of that project on Mitchell's songwriting becomes clear. On Wilderland, the title track, and Dyin Day she transforms her surveys of her country's belligerence and social irresponsibility into powerful rituals smeared with blood and dirt. Certain themes recur: the mother as shelterer, the father as shepherd, both vulnerable, both imposing fearful legacies. And as you slowly appreciate the subtlety of the music, the quiet layering of limpid percussion, pattering guitar and melancholy piano, you realise: Mitchell has done herself proud....full text |
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| Independent |
| That's the borderline Steinbeck was interested in; it's the liminal territory Mitchell likes to explore – even more vividly here, if that's possible, than on 2010's Hadestown. Young Man... deploys a quiet chamber-indie ensemble behind Mitchell's chirrup of a voice (make your own mind up about that), in the service of an epic tale of American becoming. Marvellous....full text |
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| Bbc |
"Look upon your children," Anaïs Mitchell sings on Young Man in America’s opening song; "Wandrin’ in the wilderland / Look upon your children / Wandrin’ in the woods." For her follow-up to 2010’s stunning folk-opera Hadestown she tones down the scale a little yet offers something equally startling: a modern folk record that snaps and sparkles with energy, daring to take on some formidable themes in the process. It is America itself she addresses in that first song; a country that is starting to crumble and a population that has lost its way.
While the Young Man of its title receives top billing, the LP is fleshed out by a cast of lovers, tailors, shepherds and poets, all rendered contemporary and believable in spite of the old-fashioned language they are often drawn in. The restless, desperate existence of its protagonist serves to equate our modern times and misplaced sense of duty (of materialism, broadly) with the individual crises these characters suffer. Mothers and fathers – or their absence, more specifically – figure heavily, not least on album centrepiece Shepherd, where Mitchell weaves a tragedy over the sunniest of chord patterns.
Mitchell cites her own father as a major inspiration (indeed, it is his face that adorns the cover), and the song itself is based on the prologue of a novel he wrote some 30 years ago, when he was around the same age she is now. Mitchell has noted the inherent strangeness of a life where you’re no longer being parented but not yet a parent yourself, a relatively modern phenomenon that, along with the kind of gaudy excess characters from Jay Gatsby to Dorian Gray have struggled with, considerably touches the sense of rootlessness on display here....full text |
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