The Choir – Deep Cuts
Galaxy 21 Music, 2021
Reviewed By Andre Salles

 

What a good, great gift it is to have The Choir still with us. They’ve sung a thousand songs (give or take four hundred) over their nearly four decades as a band, and they just keep on writing them. If any long-running band could justifiably rest on its laurels, it’s this one. Their importance to this corner of the music world can’t be overstated – they were the first band and the last band to play the Cornerstone Festival, after all. But rather than dull their extraordinary legacy, each new album only deepens it.

 

Part of their secret, surely, is their remarkable openness. The band treats their fans like family, and their lyrics read like letters from old friends, catching you up on the latest events in their world. We’ve been able to follow the lives of drummer/lyricist Steve Hindalong’s children from their younger years(“Wide-Eyed Wonder,” “When She Sees Me”) to their troubled years (“How I Wish I Knew”) to their adulthoods, far from their parents’ watchful eyes (“It Hurts to Say Goodbye”).

 

There’s no artifice here – The Choir is about the joy, wonder, terror, and longing of being human, expressed in poetic, yet honest terms. Three years ago, on the album Bloodshot, Hindalong laid the pain of his recent divorce bare, providing singer/guitarist Derri Daugherty with perhaps his most raw and difficult set of lyrics to sing. That album was also the last for bass player Tim Chandler, who passed away shortly after it was released. The loss of Chandler shattered the band and its fans, and to say he is missed would be to understate by miles.

 

It would not have been a surprise if The Choir had taken a break then. But Hindalong, Daugherty, and sax/lyricon player Dan Michaels have soldiered on. For Deep Cuts, their 16th full-length release, the band has chosen a powerful image depicting the Japanese art of kintsugi. It is the practice of repairing broken pottery, but not trying to disguise the cracks and fractures. This is an album about how love makes us whole, but also about how the scars we carry from our pain make us even more beautiful.

 

Make no mistake, this is an album about love, and how there is something wonderful about it. There are more love songs on Deep Cuts than on any previous record. Some, like “Kindred Spirits,” are about the universal human love that binds us all together, but mainly, Hindalong is just feeling romantic here. “I smile when I feel you close to me.” “My eyes are on fire for you.” “Honey, let me walk you home.” These songs are joyous rebirths after the emotional wringer of Bloodshot, and that joy is infectious.

 

That’s not to say that the album doesn’t acknowledge the difficult journey. The opener, “Hurricane,” which glides along on a shimmering guitar soundscape, is about finding shelter in friends and lovers as the storms rage outside. The choice to pair the pastoral lyrics of “The Woods” with the album’s most ominous musical rumblings seems to hint at darker ponderings. (“Every drop of rain might be a blessing or a curse, love endures the weather for better or for worse.”) And “Aces Over Eights,” the famous dead man’s hand, is dedicated to Chandler and speaks openly about mortality. Every time Daugherty sings “we lost one brother in the band,” it hurts.

 

The Choir boys are getting older, too, which Hindalong acknowledges in the wry “Reckless Ways.” It’s a song about his doctor prescribing moderation, about his “hooligan doppelganger” being shown the door, and I can’t help but imagine that the band smiled when sequencing “Trouble” right after it. “Trouble” is a modern classic, an impish romp with a superb melody and a shadow side: “If you’re looking for trouble, maybe I’m the kind of trouble you’re looking for…”

 

But it’s the love songs that give this album its character. The final third of Deep Cuts is flush with the surprise and warmth of new love. The rollicking “Sunshine Girl” and the gloriously earnest “Eyes on Fire” lead into “Mystical World,” released as a single in 2019, and the sequence is perfect. The title track is the mission statement this time, tying human love to the divine. It’s a love that doesn’t care who we are, who we have been, what we have done – in fact, loves us more for that. “May one divine kiss be enough to heal your heart from the deepest cuts…”

 

All of this is set to beautiful, spacious music courtesy of the Hindalong/Daugherty songwriting team. They may be one of the most consistent partnerships in music today, and while very little of this album is immediate, every track blossoms into a treasure with time. Nashville legend Chris Donohue (who has played with Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Buddy Miller, and many others) handles most of the bass duties, and Andrew Prickett (of the Prayer Chain) brings his guitar sculptures to the table. This is a full, rich-sounding record, but the standout player here might very well be Dan Michaels, whose sax and lyricon lines add immeasurably to the atmospheres being conjured.

 

The Choir is a band that has suffered plenty of deep cuts of their own, and yet they keep on creating their particular magic, year after year. Deep Cuts is one of the most warm and big-hearted records the band has made, a wonderful reminder that no matter how dark and difficult the road is, there is love. There is always love.

(Reviewed by Andre Salles)

The Choir has launched a new PATREON PROGRAM – click HERE for more info.