Great Speckled Dog
2007
Snow Angels
About This Album
Over the Rhine has released holiday records before -- make that Christmas records -- with Darkest Night of the Year, a recording of a live performance done in a public theater in Cincinnati in 1997. But Snow Angels is different. It amounts to the second full-length recording OTR has released in 2007. First came the flawed but nonetheless compelling Trumpet Child. Snow Angels, set in the coming winter, deals with seasonal themes of death and rebirth, with the time of the lowest of depressions and the greatest of joys, and results in a profound meditation on the season, on winter, and on what it allows to happen both inside the individual and for the land. It was recorded at a home studio set up in the barn of the pre-Civil War farmhouse that OTR's two permanent members, Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler, live in. Detweiler's piano has become the central aspect of OTR's instrumental sound, and it is especially so here, which is good and proper as it nostalgically recalls notions of family and friends gathering around an upright and singing together. There are few singalongs, though. Most of the songs here are jazzy, introspective tunes framed in Bergquist's ever more astonishing voice.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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