Gillian Welch

On a debut album that came out of nowhere and raised lots of questions about what bluegrass could be, this Los Angeles–born singer/songwriter does more than impersonate the hard-times praise music of Bill Monroe: She inhabits it. With partner, David Rawlings, Welch sings strong, sad ballads that invoke and do not redirect classic bluegrass and folk idioms -- faith in God, fast old cars, ties to the land, moonshining, sharecropping. The mournful "Orphan Girl" finds strength in its incantatory, repetitive structure as the lyrics spiral heavenward; "Annabelle" is a delicately plucked ballad that harbors a tragedy like a scrub-covered landmine; "By the Mark" recalls the Carter Family's harmonizing as it invokes a raw vision of Christianity very like the blunt, bloody imagery of traditional Appalachian music. Her melodies are thoroughly beautiful, and T Bone Burnett's clean, balanced production allows every aspect of the performances to shine.

Welch's tunes remain as strong as ever on her anticipated followup to Revival, but even as she strips down the production -- paring the use of drums and electric guitar -- her imagery grows more lurid and hopeless, the songs slower, and the strings skewed toward the minor. While the bluegrass-country-folk axis she mines for inspiration provides a direct route to a certain set of values and emotions, her insistence on expressing those values in antiquated terms is troubling.

Songs such as "Good Til Now," "Miner's Refrain," and "My Morphine" are sung from a male point of view, and her tales of hardship seem to take place on a shabby back porch of the long-ago past. Only when Welch speeds up the pace -- on the roadhouse blues "Honey Now" -- or crafts one of the circularly constructed ballads of Christian faith at which she excels (in this case the death-directed "Rock of Ages") does Hell Among the Yearlings rise above the melancholy but archaic litany of sin, rape, lost girls, bad boys, cut throats, and gunshot wounds.

Exactly the record that Welch needed to make, Time (The Revelator) is also the record her fans wanted to hear, proving that her songwriting could transcend the dated idioms in which she previously trafficked. Cowritten with David Rawlings, the songs are neither trendy nor dated but fresh, thoughtful, and full-blooded modern folk with gritty rock edges and meltingly lovely melodies. Welch's simple voice does complicated things on the tough "My First Lover," and muses gently on the anti-Napster "Everything Is Free." On "I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll," Welch and Rawlings cast rock & roll as anything that makes a joyful noise unto the Lord -- in this case, a peppy mid-tempo ballad. "Dear Someone" is as gentle and pure as a Stephen Foster tune, the earthy "Red Clay Halo" is rousing in her older style, and "Elvis Presley Blues" is a gimlet-sharp and heartfelt examination of Elvis' instinctive genius.

On Soul Journey, Welch's slow, earnest songs 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. Welch does rise to the occasion on the album's few uptempo numbers: On the bluegrass session "No One Knows My Name," which owes 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. (ARION BERGER/JON CARAMANICA)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide