It was our friends at Wordsmiths Books that first introduced me to Athens/Decatur, Georgia trio Hope For Agoldensummer, when they made the band’s gorgeously-packaged Ariadne Thread album the first CD stocked by the bookstore.
It’s taken a while, a good couple of months, for this album to begin nestling in my heart, wrapping itself deep and low around those guttural, blood-and-bone places that, when lingered in, makes music become part of the very fiber of being.
That’s the landscape, really, of the Hope For Agoldensummer sound.
Together, Page Campbell, Claire Campbell and Deb Davis call themselves a “junkyard soul trio”, but they’re actually so much more. This is music that’s definitively southern, definitely rural, and reminiscent of a folk-art angel singing her heart out. At times, the territory tread by Hope For Agoldensummer is equal parts Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor with weaponry provided by Nick Cave-the sort of songs that hold knives behind their backs, lingering in sweetness just long enough to unveil the darkness lingering ‘neath. Other times, the songs are southern field gospel revivals, celebrating the sweaty southern pastures of life and love.
This song treads the territory of the morning after that is the latter, but only after passing through the darkened terrain of the former.
Hope For Agoldensummer: 4th Night
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In my morning, things didn’t feel as they should-in my heart or in my head. It’s possible I guided iTunes to this song, but I have more faith in the fact that it was kinda chosen.
The thing with the soulful vocals, the soft finger-plucked instrumentation-it’s all so damn tangible, so damn human, so present. So much of the redemptive quality of all of Hope ForAgoldensummer’s music comes from that ever-present (even in darkness) humanity, and it’s what I didn’t know I needed this morning when this song found me.
Sometimes you just have to let it all go, let it all break, y’know?
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