100 Best Albums of the 2000s: Gillian Welch, 'Time the Revelator'

100 Best Albums of the 2000s

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Gillian Welch, 'Time the Revelator'

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In which the reigning queen of old-timey Americana (and her longtime collaborator, singer-guitarist David Rawlings) give the mountain music treatment to a suite of rock & roll songs. Time the Revelator is gorgeous, dreamy, and a little bit weird – 10 finely honed songs about love, sex, dancing, Elvis Presley and other timeless subjects, adorned only with acoustic guitar, banjo and luscious harmony vocals. The result is a lovely exercise in anachronism: what rock & roll would have sounded like had it been invented in the 1930s Dust Bowl.