Crooked Still – Still Crooked

Crooked Still weren’t anybody to know about when their 1995 debut Hop High finally worked into the stereo. Aoife O’Donovan had a pretty voice, but that wasn’t enough, not quite enough, and so, after a quick look at the songlist, I skipped forward to their cover of Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl”, made it halfway through, and gave up.

Wrong song. Well-meant, but they hadn’t made it theirs.

A year later, in comes Shaken By A Low Sound, and it didn’t hurry into the CD player either, but once it got there, it didn’t leave for days. It was and is a stunning, gorgeous, complicated album, and it remains unfiled, piled atop the turntable. Beautiful and full of joy. They had found their voice, their way forward.

The low sound (or one meaning of it, anyway) was Rushad Eggleston’s cello, a strange thing to find in a string band or a Celtic band or a neo-bluegrass band, all of which Crooked Still might be or have been. And it swings. The whole album swings — jerks sometimes, but swings — recasting a set of mostly public domain songs as fresh clay.

And then Eggleston left, leaving clear the title of their third album, Still Crooked (set for June 24 release on Signature Sounds), for the band, expanded from quartet to quintet, is now inescapably centered on O’Donovan’s voice.

This time her voice is enough, but it’s perhaps a nearer thing than it should be. (And perhaps I simply do not handle change well.)

To begin with, they have unexpectedly acquired manners, something of a surprise because O’Donovan’s participation in the rippling, occasionally risque Sometymes Why side-project hinted at other, wilder impulses. Instead, Crooked Still have found their way into a kind of chamber music through these old sounds (the opening “Undone In Sorrow”, “Pharoah”, especially “Tell Her To Come Back Home”), suggesting that, perhaps, this generation of young and enormously talented string players will migrate not toward pop music, but into realms occupied by Evan Lurie, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and even Kronos Quartet. Chris Thile and Abigail Washburn have already drifted that way, of course.

The new lineup — with Tristan Clarridge (cello) and Brittany Haas (violin) augmenting O’Donovan, Corey DiMario (bass) and Gregory Lizst (banjo) — still plays urgently, but has embraced a rounder tone that supports O’Donovan’s vocals rather than tartly offsetting them.

They lay gently behind her gorgeous reading of “Captain, Captain”, framing its lament around her carefully restrained phrasing. Clarridge’s cello solo is spot-on for the song, and elegant. (And less muscular than what might have come before.) The instruments settle quietly behind O’Donovan on “Low Down And Dirty”, too.

When they do rise up (“Oh, Agamemnon”, “Poor Ellen Smith”), they do it with concerted focus and purpose. There’s no wasted energy here, no random notes played, and the only surprise is how beautifully it comes off. It’s careful music, and it does not seek to swing.

O’Donovan will inevitably be compared to Alison Krauss, though I am also reminded of early Margo Timmins. Which means she sings high, sometimes softly, sometimes with a lot of breath, and which leaves out her expressive lower register. In fairness, her tone just now has more variety than either of those better-known names did early on (I’ll put her new “Wading Deep Waters” against about anything, for example). No matter. O’Donovan can be a star, if she wishes. If it matters.

Albums are snapshots in time, and sometimes what appears in the moment to be a clear statement of purpose, a new direction, is later revealed to be a digression, a cul de sac. Crooked Still are…still…a new band, and personnel changes are both transformative and traumatic. That O’Donovan and her collaborators grow each time out — that’s the part that matters.