Rebecca Martin - She - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Produced by Martin and recorded in Portugal by Mário Barreiros, SHE arrives as her first full-length project of original songs since 2013's Twain (an LP made with her husband and longtime collaborator, esteemed jazz bassist Larry Grenadier and produced by Pete Rende). In an evolution of the finespun musicality the New York Times once praised as Inchalmost radical in it's utter lack of flash,Inch SHE's 13 songs encompass a stark yet strangely enchanting arrangement of voice and acoustic guitar-ultimately achieving a potent minimalism that's wholly poetic in it's nuanced command of sonic language. Threaded with Martin's impressionistic reflections on identity, transformation, and the often-mystifying passage of time, the result is an album that invites complete surrender to it's unhurried splendor and-in turn-creates abundant room for the audience to drift into a similar state of meditative contemplation.Intended to be absorbed in it's entirety, SHE opens on the delicate melodies of InchPlay for meInch one of several newly reimagined renditions of Martin's earlier work (in this case, a cut from her critically lauded 2004 LP People Behave Like Ballads), presented here as Inchan invitation for whoever's listening to sit down and walk through this with me,Inch in her words. Over the course of the album, Martin casts an ineffable spell with her intuitively composed guitar parts and harmonies-an element she regards as a chorus of characters in a play made up of interwoven tone poems. On InchJust another heartbreak,Inch for instance, Martin's layered vocals lend a tender humanity to her meditation on violence and empathy, while the luminous harmonies InchThe crass are cradled tooInch embody a heartfelt grasping for common ground in times of intense polarization. Closing out with InchEast AndoverInch (a wistful reminiscence of her hometown in Maine), SHE altogether comprises