ELIZA GILKYSON – The Nocturne Diaries (Red House RHR-264)

NocturneAs the title suggests, while may be some harsher musical moments (notably the gutsy ringing guitar driven ‘The Red Rose And The Thorn’), this is an album borne from the thoughts and musings that both sooth and trouble our thoughts during the hours of darkness.

Produced by her multi-instrumentalist son, Cisco Ryder, it finds her musing equally on despair and hope,  from the  catchy folk-rock of ‘An American Boy’, sung from the perspective of a young boy planning to blow up his school and kill his fellow students, ‘Not My Home’’s account of young victim of domestic sexual abuse and the it’s all going to hell vision of the strummed acoustic ‘World Without End’ to the twangsome rootsy hymnal optimism of ‘Touchstone’ and the don’t be so worried about everything letter to self of the hoedown shaped ‘Eliza Jane’. Pointedly, opening track ‘Midnight Oil’ offers a cascading chords  lullaby of hardship ahead and “what was lost in our spiral down from grace” but promises a new, better world rising from the old.

With perfect timing given the release of Darren Aronosfky’s Biblical epic, a slow building ‘The Ark’ is a first person account by  Noah as to why he’s building his refuge from destruction while elsewhere,  ‘No Tomorrow’, with its throaty, plangent guitar, is a live life while you can love song and ‘Where No Monument Stands’, John Gorka’s arrangement of William Stafford’s poem about a field never blighted by battle, celebrates the heroic struggle, not of man but nature.

For an album with concerns of family at its core, Gilkyson fittingly chooses to include a cover of ‘Freight Train’, a spooked 50s song about settling down written by her father Terry and featuring harmonies from her daughter Delia Castillo and,  extending the locomotive image, opts to close out with ‘All Right Now’, a pedal steel soothed, gently slow country waltzing song about how she could have pursued fame and fortune in the charts, but instead values the treasure of home and love that she has “right here in my heart”. After the dark clouds of an uneasy sleep, here’s is the dawn and the golden awakening to what truly counts.  Take once daily before retiring.

Mike Davies

Artist website: www.elizagilkyson.com