Pentimento

The first notes of Pentimento are birdsong, and with it in the distance, Carson McHone reads from an 1840 letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.” One of the birds whistles a distinct three-note tune. McHone whistles it back. A piano takes up the line, and the song “Winter Breaking” blooms into being. In the study of physical art, the pentimento is an artefact, a remnant of a previous draft or altogether different painting that’s apparent beneath layers of paint on a finished canvas. Within seconds of Pentimento, one hears how the album organises itself around this idea: “Winter Breaking” is an astonishing piece of songwriting, a meticulously crafted guitar-pop jewel that finds McHone at the peak of her powers as a bandleader and a lyricist. The first 30 seconds contain the pentimenti, the earlier sounds, spaces, and materials that became this sound.

The effect is staggering; even for McHone, whose output to this point has seen her channel seemingly disparate influences into a unique, alluring sonic signature, Pentimento marks a radical expansion of the scale of her ambitions. The “all of it” present here is not just the album, but context. The 185 years between McHone and Emerson. Two seasons in the desert. Six days spent oceanside with friends. The eternity between us and the first notes of birdsong. Thrillingly alive in the music are exquisite articulations of pastoral folk with snatches of spoken word or a choice instrument that casts a song in elegiac light. Occasional riffs that call back to her roots in Texas build towards moments of organic and tactile rock, with tambourines and claps, homemade instruments, and layered acoustics. The record is an anchor in the ceaseless flow of time, a home amidst the tumult of the moment we find ourselves in now—love and beauty in the presence of brutality.

Pentimento is an audacious and rewarding record. It is also a reckoning: How can love and beauty exist in the presence of brutality? Disquietingly. Dissonantly. Against its shadow and bearing its mark. This is what McHone and her collaborators capture on Pentimento with the subtlety of watercolor painting and the richness of verse, in ghost vocals and child voices alike. Every layer is a universe unto itself, revealing the pulse that animates Carson McHone’s creative drive. Arranged here and expressed as a whole, it constitutes a masterpiece.