ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘Woodland,’ Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Pick Up Where They Left Off

Personal and professional partners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have been performing minimal, slowed down, dreamy lonesome country folk for some three decades now. The main thing that’s changed since Welch’s string of classic albums — Revival (1995) through The Harrow and the Harvest (2011) — is that the duo has started recording less frequently and Rawlings has gotten equal billing. Other than that, their new album, Woodland, maintains the same mix of contemplation, despair, and transcendence in which the occasional mention of hashtags doesn’t change the sense that you’re moseying through a landscape as old as music or mortality.

Consistency, in this case, is a virtue. Their last album together, 2020’s All the Good Times Are Past and Gone (ND story), was a covers exercise in which they managed to make even the flirtatious June and Johnny duet “Jackson” sound ragged and weary. On Woodland, they dig into a set of original tunes that could easily be outtakes from Welch’s 2001 masterpiece Time (The Revelator). The first track, “Empty Trainload of Sky,” pulls out of the station and starts rolling toward that sweet spot of hippie good grooves and theological dread: “For a moment I was tempted to fly / To the Devil or the Lord / as it hung there like a sword / Just an empty trainload of sky.” There’s also a “hey hey, my, my” lyrical shout-out to one of the couple’s most obvious musical gods, Neil Young.

Rawlings takes lead vocals on a couple of tracks, including the nostalgic anthem “What We Had.” His rangy Gram Parsons-esque performance works well enough, but (like the vast majority of singers) the direct comparison with Welch’s rough lonesome voice and peerless, spacious phrasing doesn’t exactly do him any favors. It does reemphasize, though, what a unique voice Welch is. She doesn’t often make lists of greatest singers ever, but she should.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (photo by Alysse Gafkjen)

The best tracks for Welch and Rawlings are often the longest ones — performances where Welch can draw out the words, seemingly forget about them, put them down, and wander up to them again, until the song seems to expand into a whole universe of dust and loss. Sure enough, the two performances that go over 5 minutes (“North Country” and “Here Stands a Woman”) on Woodland are the most haunting — though the bluesy “Howdy Howdy,” where the two singers tag-team vocals, is close behind.

In a 30-year career, Welch and Rawlings have made few aesthetic missteps. They follow the one path, slow and lovely and bleak. Luckily for listeners, while they pause here and there, they show no sign of stopping.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ Woodland is out Aug. 23 on Acony Records.