Friday, June 18, 2010

"Anchor In The Valley" - Anchor In The Valley - A Review

Kelsey Waldon or her alias 'Anchor In The Valley" is quite a remarkable young lady. Her sound is innocent, pretty and there is a nice blend of music that sounds like a simple recording. She seems to be a product of her small town, Barlow ,Kentucky near the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Her songs can cut to your heart when you listen to the words, her her instrumentalists play some great fills. Now, she resides in Paducha ,Kentucky. She recorded this in Nashville at Battle Ridge Studios. She produced this with Phil Harris who won a grammy for recording best country instrumental in 06 "Whiskey Before Breakfast" (Bryan Sutton and Doc Watson).

She wrote all ten songs, mostly acoustic ballads and she herself plays acoustic guitar on the CD. The CD pic of her on the back looks like a young Linda Ronstadt, who is in her list of influences.

Her music faithfully captures the spirit of The Carter Family, it's music from the hills. Track # eight "Miss What I've Known" has some great fiddle and backup vocals. This sounds like a once and done recording, no overdubbing.

Track 9 "You Don't Believe(in loving me)" is one of the fullest sounding songs with the most instruments, some great electric guitar. She has a very good collection of musicians to help her out in the studio.

Track 10 "My Eyes are Open, Now I see" is a gospel song of hers. She said it was from parts of songs that she remembered singing in Church growing up ,when she was young.

The guitarist Andrew Sovine is an incredible player as is the lap steel player , Mike Witcher.

Track 2 "Ballad for Modern Times, Part 2" (Where is Part 1?) is a very good song, would love to hear Part One if it so exist.
Waldon has a way with words. She will be in the middle of a sentence in a song and the song will just end.

Track #5 "Waitin On My Man" is from another time as a lot of her music is, She has discovered like 50s-60s Kentucky/mountain music, and it is just plain pretty, I thought that the CD sounded like it was an analog tape recording. I was close, it was recordd om a Hard drive system and then mastered from analog tape. The infamous Doug Sax likes to do that and it gives the recording a very warm feel.

Track 4 "Young Girl (who grew up with the country) is a Deep song, the words are cerebral. Sovine is blowing me away with some beautiful fades on his electric guitar. He just plays a simple long sustaining line that is so full of emotion.

Do yourself a favor, don't download this, buy the CD, When I put it in my disc player for the first time ,the change in sound quality from the mp3 to CD is more than minimal, her producer does some beautiful stuff with The Stereo field, that I did not notice on the computer.

The artwork is cool too. It is designed to look like a small LP. It has a huge body of water as the Front pic, a nice small pic of her on the back. It says Hi - Fi Recording on the back. There is some just plain great music here that is different from the norm of what you see artists doing today.You can download her songs from Amazon, ITunes, CD Baby or you can order a hardback copy from
www.anchorinthevalley.bigcartel.com

www.myspace.com/anchorinthevalley
www.facebook.com/anchorinthevalley

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