Music |
Rattlin’ Bones
Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Rock
After a certain age and a certain number of — oh, let’s not call them failed, let’s say successfully completed — relationships, it’s inspiring to hear a man and woman singing together. When the couple is married, even more inspiring. For what is a happy marriage if not harmony under pressure? To spend your days and nights singing as a team — that, friends, is togetherness you can believe in.
I first encountered Kasey Chambers when she released her debut CD, The Captain. She had a fogcutter of a voice that demanded attention. And she could flatten a note like the best bluegrass singers — you’d swear she’d left the hollow only to get a bunch of piercings.
In fact, Kasey Chambers is Australian. And that’s the least of it — when she was very young, her father, the musician Bill Chambers, moved his family into a barren zone of that empty continent and spent a decade as a fox hunter. Kasey grew up under a giant sky and an empty landscape; at night, around a campfire, her father led his family in songs straight from the Grand Ole Opry. She might as well have been living in the hollow.
Kasey Chambers is now married to Shane Nicholson, also Australian, and they have a debut CD of their own, Rattlin’ Bones. I saw them at a club in New York, with her father as the sidekick, and I can report her voice is still as big as her personality. Brash? Loud? This woman has a personality sharp enough to shave with!
It would be easy to say that Kasey Chambers dominates her husband — Nicholson is one of those skinny guys with the wispy beard and the porkpie hat — but he’s hardly Desi to her Lucy. If anything, he’s the superior musician, and the songs he’s co-written with his wife are easily the best she’s ever done.
Which is not to say these are goopy love songs. The title song announces that heaven and hell are the CD’s dominant images. To what might as well be the steady hammering on an anvil, they sing:
Smoke don’t rise
Fuel don’t burn
Sun don’t shine no more
Late one night, sorrow come round
Scratching at my door
But I cut my hands
And break my back
Draggin’ this bag of stones
Till they bury me down, beneath the ground
With the dust and rattlin’ bones
And then they’re off, trading lines, as dobros, banjos, lap-steel guitars and fiddles work their magic underneath. It’s spooky stuff, and when she sings about her “monkey on the wire”, the writing takes you very far — those dark desires are “walking like Jesus with voodoo in their eyes.”
Just that loud, just that soft. When the pace slows, Kasey Chambers seems to have invented sadness. Together, Chambers and Nicholson take love as it comes: “Let’s hold our breath and give it just one more year.” And face a dark possibility: “Let’s hope that what we fear ain’t what we’ve become.”
“Rattlin’ Bones” hit #1 in Australia. I can understand why. It’s not the kind of two-for-one CD we so often get here — a collection of duets, a star turn. It is, as Chambers says, “an album that sounds like a band with two singers in it.”
For once, she understates. This CD is as big and bold as the sky she was raised under, an outrageously fine enterprise that has the rare power, in less than an hour, to break your heart and make you believe in endless love.
To buy “Rattlin’ Bones” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Captain” from Amazon.com, click here.
