The Rheingans Sisters much-vaunted new album ‘Start Close In,’ is now available. Once more the multi-award winning siblings mix their finely matched voices with violin, viola and an arsenal of accompanying instruments that would have given the Incredibles a run for their money.
This is a supremely engineered feast of noise and styles. On ‘Devil’ a radio-tuning introduction announces a persistently threatening backing to an old tale where Satan tells a farmer he is going to take one of his family to Hell with him. Things go more or less as expected but there’s a wry dose of table-turning on the original storyline. Old Nick appears in the title of another piece – ‘The Great Devil/Mr. Turner’s Hornpipe’ is based on an 18th century English dance tune, played stately and slowly before a brilliantly-gathered transition into the hornpipe. The Occitan song ‘Un Voltigeur’ is a joy. Given a new melody by Anna Rheingans, it’s a song about who to love and trust, contained in the guise of how to tend to the garden. Simple, tender, delicate and charmingly enriched by Daniel Thornes’s tenor saxophone.
Genre diverse as ever, the sisters and their accomplices offer an ever-changing complex album. Infectious fiddles, mesmerizing bones and drones and persuasive percussions wrap themselves around themes and melodies from the wistful to the capricious, the sparse to the complex, where lyrics will bid you to laugh or cry in equal measure and the commonplace meets the earth-shattering. No grooves to get stuck in with the Rheingans. Time spent in custody under their ‘sonic arrest’ will be well-spent.
Bob Langstaff.
rheinganssisters.co.uk
