A mixture of utterly trad folk and country tunes with some hipsterish indie touches, The Black Dove is uneven, but it works more often than it doesn't. The songs sung by Sharron Kraus, a British folksinger whose voice bears comparison both to U.K. folk icons like June Tabor and American country singers like Gillian Welch, fit uneasily against those featuring Christian Kiefer's hushed bedroom-rock murmur. Imagine Norma Waterson collaborating with Elliott Smith and the parameters of the project's influences will become clear, as well as its flaws. However, the songs featuring Kraus are uniformly excellent, as are the atmospheric instrumental interludes between songs, which occasionally recall Dolly Collins' fantasias for harmonium on her albums with sister Shirley. Kiefer's whispery material, which works better on his solo records, simply sounds out of place in these surroundings.
This is it, the absolute perfect starting point for neophyte fans who want to discover the Stanley Brothers. The years between 1949 and 1952, when the Virginia brothers were signed to Columbia Records, are largely considered their most fruitful period. Certainly this lineup of their backing band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, was the strongest; besides Carter Stanley's assured leads and Ralph Stanley's heartbreaking tenor, these recordings introduced mandolin player Darrell "Pee Wee" Lambert and his one-of-a-kind high-baritone harmonies, the secret ingredient that made the Stanley Brothers' recordings from this era sound like nothing that had come before in bluegrass.
While both Carter and Ralph Stanley are musical treasures of the first rank, I have to confess that Ralph Stanley is my favorite bluegrass performer, and one of my favorite singers of any musical genre. Both brothers possessed prodigious musical gifts (anyone doubting Ralph's genius need only listen to his stunning a capella rendition of "O Death" on the O BROTHER WHERE ARE THOU? soundtrack to bring about a revision of their opinion), so it is almost impossible to imagine a greater bluegrass singing voice than these brothers.
The Moody Blues get the two-disc treatment on the latest installment of Polydor's surprisingly thorough Gold series. Rather than just assemble the usual suspects around staples like "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Story in Your Eyes" (which are here), the compilers dove deep into the group's career, providing tracks from solo recordings like "Remember Me My Friend" from Justin Hayward and John Lodge's excellent Blue Jays album and their gorgeous follow-up single, "Blue Guitar," as well as lesser-known late-'70s/early-'80s cuts from Octave, The Present, and Sur la Mer…
The Early Starday-King Years: 1958-1961 is a 109-track, four-disc box set that compiles every track the Stanley Brothers cut for Starday and King during that era. At the time, the group were releasing albums both on Starday and King, so there was an immense amount of confusion between the releases; the box set helps clarify the matters, by gathering all of the music together and presenting it in chronological order. This way, it's possible to hear their progression, as well as the differences between the recordings for the two labels; on the King recordings, the Stanley Brothers tended to be more experimental, working in electric instrumentation. Though there is plenty of fine music on the set, The Early Starday-King Years is, overall, too thorough and extensive for anyone but bluegrass historians.