Gillian Welch: Soul Journey : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Roots-music disciple Gillian Welch never met a languid, Spartan arrangement she couldn't sidle up to and charm. On Soul Journey, though, her slow, earnest songs (co-written with longtime collaborator David Rawlings) don't have the texture of those from her three previous albums. Tracks such as "Lowlands" and "One Monkey" are meant to sound stately and austere, but they just seem stagnant. By contrast, Welch rises to the occasion of the album's few up-tempo numbers: On the bluegrass session "No One Knows My Name," which owes sonic debts to Ralph Stanley and Charley Patton, she laments, "My mother was just a girl, seventeen/It's a wonder that I'm in this world at all." And on "One Little Song," she pines for "one little word that ain't been abused a thousand times/In a thousand rhymes." Sometimes, she even finds it.

JON CARAMANICA
(From RS 924, June 12, 2003)