Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
What can be summoned through the simplest of human acts in a certain setting can lead some to believe that grave luck may follow, or to others a sign that from the sense and realm of the ethereal comes a kind of guidance, that the spirits who heard you Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard are there not only to aid, but spread fortune in your favour.
To the three distinctive personalities that have come to enhance the album Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard, such is the belief that their dedication and skill not only appeases the spirits standing by their stones and nodding in time to the cool persuasion being heard, but actively encourages them to speak to the living in ways that heighten the soul’s pleasure, is a gracious and spellbinding response for the listener to attach themselves to.
Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard brings together Andy Cohen, Eleanor Ellis, and Wiliam Lee Ellis in a combination of sweet lyrical aroma that feels immersive in genres of old-time blues, gospel, ragtime and country with a deftness of ease that shoulders the responsibility and fashions them into a cohesive movement of time and experience.
From an extensive set of songs that includes Mr. Furry’s Blues, Police Dog Blues, Won’t That Be A Happy Time, Handful Of Frets (For Fats Waller), I’ll Be Rested (When The Roll Is Called), the album title track of Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard, and the excellence of Chicken, the threesome’s ambitions seem unlimited, forceful, a peeling back of simultaneous layers that reveal relevance to a time when songs perhaps were simpler but more grounded, an embrace of the forever surrounding them.
There is the mistake that many believe in earnest, that when the past is no longer seen visible, when it fades into the background of displaced eternity, it becomes unconnected to the modern body of music, of emotional delivery; that is untrue, indeed it finds a new expression of joy or anger to immerse the contemporary listener into a prevailing sense of occasion and place. This is the effect that rooting through the possibly forgotten by the multitude has, a sense of reinvigoration and reinvention. Holding a mirror up to the past and see its parallels growing in abundance.
Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard is not just an act of associated cheerfulness when the world looks bleak, it is a reminder that on every headstone you pass is inscribed a hope you must hold as your own, to bring the past once more to life with honour and exuberance.
Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard isreleased on March 20th on Riverlark Music.
Ian D. Hall