Over The Rhine - Meet Me At The Edge Of The World Review

rating: 4

Over the Rhine hails from Ohio, which is not something that you will ever doubt again after listening to Meet Me at the Edge of the World. What does surprising is that this love letter to rural living comes from a band that took their name from a community which, at the time they were naming their band, was one of the most impoverished urban areas in the country. Inspired by the purchase of a pre-Civil War cabin in the countryside by Karin Bergquist and husband Linford Detweiler "Meet Me at the Edge of the World" reunites the team behind 2011's album, "The Long Surrender." With Joe Henry back in the production chair the music moves like wisps of smoke around the beautiful lyrics. A wall of sound is created where even the faintest background noises sneak in to your mind and bring your senses to focus. Ambient sound is one of Henry's strengths in production, and unlike the typical wall of sound, the one here at no time threatens to overwhelm you, but inites you into the room for a seat and some bourbon. Domesticity is an often untapped source of inspiration in popular music, maybe musicians just feel like they should all embody the spirit of Dion's wanderer, and that works for us as an audience because it lets us enter a gateway of proxy rebellion, but we don't use proxies for contentment, contentment implies we stopped looking for something. The title track, "Meet Me at the Edge" of the World sounds like Gillian Welch's cover of "Billy", but it is our opening invitation to meet the band for a new experiment, one where we get to step outside of the usual fear and greed of most of the songs on the radio. The only complaint I have is that, for me, home is a place to visit, and this album lives there for 19 tracks. Any double album will require dedication from the listener, just like it required it from the artists. When taken as a whole it takes close listening to spot the differences between the songs, which as individual units are finely crafted, but when taken together the sense of sameness starts to creep in. Unsurprisingly, it's the songs that break out of the mold which garner attention during your first play of the album. The cover of The Band's "It Makes No Difference" which has always been one of my favorite songs from that group was a personal highlight, but other songs like "Earthbound Love Song" "Favorite Time of Light" and "Meet Me At the Edge of the World" with their more alt-country inspired arrangements really stand out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN9t42BYfRo "Just shy of breaking down there's a bend in the road that I have found called home" starts "Call Home" a song about finally reaching a place of peace, being able to set up and start feeling better. These aren't songs about weakness; these are songs about recovery, being with family and friends, but the image that comes most clearly is two people sitting on their porch, looking out for a hundred miles over the flat Ohio countryside to where the sun is going down. The reason why so many aviators come from Ohio is simple, there's just so much damn sky to taunt you, people reach for the stars to try and fight back, hopefully the sky will continue to spur bands like Over the Rhine forward.