Reviews: Homeland/Brink: CDs For The Soul

There's probably not an area in the New Age arena that's more overpopulated than the world of New Age music. Each month it seems that hundreds of new titles are released by the many small independent labels that seek to serve the New Age community. Like everything else in the world, some of these releases are very good, some are just so-so and others are downright horrible. Unfortunately, when it comes to New Age music, most CDs fall in to the later category.

Music designed specifically for the alternative spirit crowd runs the gamut from the overly etheric to very basic cultural samples. Some is almost completely without rhythm or melody, meant to be used as background while sitting in meditation. Other titles are almost nothing but drums and beat, meant to help the listener dance into ecstasy. Most is not meant to be listened to with the same attention you might pay to the latest release by REM or Stone Temple Pilots, although there are exceptions to this rule.

A few weeks ago, I received a couple of New Age titles to review in this column. One of these excited me very much – on the surface it looked great. The other caused me to shrug my shoulders and elicited no anticipation whatsoever.

Bill Douglas' Homeland: A Prayer For Peace, just released on the Hearts of Space label, would seem at first glance to be tailor made for those of us who grew up during the era of the great folk music revival, when groups like Peter, Paul & Mary, The Brothers Four, The Weavers and the Kingston Trio filled the airwaves, paving the way for the folk-rock that became popular in the middle of the 1960s. A quick look at the liner notes shows that the album is something of a response of to the World Trade Center episode, and includes a mixture of traditional folk tunes mixed in with some original material.

Some may like it, but for my tastes the album turned out to be a terrific bore. Not that it's unprofessional or bad; the presentation is very well done and the musicianship is excellent. It's just that this is folk music in the vein of the Robert Shaw Chorale, bland and homogenized, rather than the more gritty approach of, say, Richard Dyer Bennet or Jimmy Driftwood. There's very little emotion here, except for a white bread sentimentality which is found in abundance.

The album opens with a choral rendition of “Shenandoah,” the beautiful folk anthem from old Virginia. The Ars Nova Singers, who do the singing, are very capable and the harmonies are beautiful, but the presentation is common and the arrangement has nothing to distinguish it. Worse than that, when the chorus tackles the plaintive and always wonderful “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” they decide to rewrite the melody, leaving us with familiar lyrics set to a tune that's almost, but not quite, right. Most of the original material is instrumental and falls into the category of “New Age elevator music,” with pretentiousness written all over it.

On the other hand, Brink, the just released album by Dave Stringer on the Valley Entertainment label (the parent company for Hearts of Space), is a pure delight. According to Stringer, this collection of original tunes “is a mosaic of my experiences during the time I lived at Gurudev Siddha Peeth, in Ganeshpuri, India” - which would usually a bad sign. However, on listening, this is a wonderful collection of colorful and interesting songs, written in the singer/songwriter vein. If Gordon Lightfoot or Bruce Cockburn spent some time in India and decided to write an album around their experiences, the result might be similar.

These are very traditional Western style songs, yet Stringer has folded-in Indian influences, both in the instruments he uses and in musical style. The result can be favorably compared with the best of George Harrison or Ravi Shankar, very palatable to Western ears, while offering an educational sampling of the rich tapestry of music from the Indian subcontinent.

Unlike most New Age musicians, Stringer does not see life as being filled with bliss and white light. In “Checking The Arithmetic,” the album's opening track, he questions the orderliness that some claim to find in the universe. “Am I just a mutation with a curious urge?” he asks. “An endless vexation, a mistake that recurs? A singular statistic, a product of the dice?” The album also offers a taste of Hindu culture, where there is room for bliss. In “Shivo'ham, Shivo'ham,” an anthem to the deity Shiva, he says ”I am not mind, intellect, ego or memory; not ears or tongue or smell or sight; not ether, air, fire, water or earth; I am consciousness and bliss, I am Shiva!”

Homeland by Bill Douglas and Brink by Dave Stringer were both released on August 13th and are available online at Amazon.com.

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