Alela Diane
The Pirate's Gospel
Rogue / Inertia



Alela Diane ploughs the same territory as fellow tragic songbird Marissa Nadler, a lonely American Gothic landscape that exists outside of time. But where Nadler's gossamer voice imbues her music with a haunting beauty, Diane is affecting because of its slight raggedness not too far removed from Trailer Bride's Melissa Swingle, and it is from this instrument that the album derives its beauty. Ornamented by little other than a guitar and occasionally a harmonising voice, it's a sparseness that evokes a rural setting far from the jolly maritime theme that the album's title and artwork suggest.

Written in the wake of her parent's divorce and loss of the family home, 'The Pirate's Gospel' is a drawn out lament for those things, but also a tribute to the beauty that existed before and her parents figure thematically throughout the album (her dad recorded and played on it, too). This isn't a confessional album though, and when Diane sings "papa gets the rifle from the place above the French doors", on The Rifle, she isn't singing her own story but that of an anonymous rural sleepy hollow where pain and sadness are constant visitors. The title track throws in a growling nautical chorus and banjo that only emphasises the starkness of the music that precedes and follows it, and while that might be the most immediate entry point into the album, Pieces of String may just be the highlight, a gorgeous ballad that meanders along gracefully with the occasional assistance of a children's choir. There's room for unaffected whimsy, too, as evidenced on Something' Gone Awry, but that track's minute-long running time sets it up as merely a break from the gravity that characterises the rest of album.

Diane drifts between lyrical literalism (to the point of getting children to sing along to the line, "I'd have a choir of little children sing along", with surprisingly beautiful results) and poetic imagery like "my mother, she gave me these feather breasts," on Oh! My Mama, but the often obtuse allegory lends the lyrics enough ambiguity to bear repeated listens. If Diane was a lost soul from the 70s a la Karen Dalton and this was her only testament, it would be revered as a classic. As it is, 'The Pirate's Gospel' is a beautiful album and at about half an hour as ephemeral as Diane's voice, and as beautiful.

Alexis Buxton-Collins