Eliza Gilkyson – Land Of Milk And Honey
Eliza Gilkyson is the daughter of Terry Gilkyson, a successful folk song writer back in the fifties and sixties. From South West America, she is mainly a folk artist but has dabbled in more new-age sounding material as well. She started her own record label Realiza Records and released her breakthrough album
Misfits in 1999. Next year was
Hard Times In Babylon and
Lost And Found both of which received much critical acclaim, but modest commercial success.
Inducted into the Austin Hall Of Fame in February 2003,
Land Of Milk and Honey is her 11th release.
Review:
One of the most striking things about this album is the unusual beauty of Eliza’s voice. It is extremely distinctive and a unadulterated pleasure to listen to. She’s one of those artists that you imagine could give any song, no matter how bad, some musicality. The flowing quality of her vocals and the tonality as she expresses things she clearly believes in very strongly is just fantastic.
As well as being blessed with a wonderful voice, Eliza is also a very talented songwriter. She is able to write simple, catchy and memorable melodies that suit her voice to perfection and also match up to her lyrics very well. Never going for a pop-type chorus, she just lets the music swell and create a climax almost on its own. Quite extraordinary.
Just by looking at the CD sleeve it’s obvious this is a political record, and throughout the album current issues are raised. Almost the most striking song in this respect is
The Ballad Of Yvonne Johnson, which is about the true story of a Cree woman who suffered intense mental and physical anguish her whole life. I can think of few other artists who would tackle this sort of subject matter in such a direct but sensitive manner.
The song, however, that is the most utterly original and current in this respect is
Tender Mercies which, believe it or not, is about suicide bombers. This is the song that introduced me to this artist, and I bought the album just because I’d never heard of anyone else this willing to tackle such difficult issues. Whilst it sounds as if this song would be possibly quite brash and unnecessary, instead it proves to be a thoughtful take on the concept with some wonderful song writing as well.
Land Of Milk And Honey features two songs not written by Eliza.
Runnin Away was written by her father, who died in 1999. It is one of the highlights of the album, once again very simple and very easy to listen to yet with that extra bit of bite in the lyrics.
Peace Call is originally by Woody Guthrie and makes a lovely end to the album, being unsurprisingly a very peaceful song and an uplifting one as well.
Track Highlists:
Tender Mercies
Ballad Of Yvonne Johnson
Runnin Away
Peace Call
I would urge you to check this artist out if you are at all interested in folk music, or even if you’re not because her music is very accessible and really really worth the effort. I know it’s very difficult to download any tracks from this album, but you can hear samples from
Hiway 9 and
Peace Call at [url]http://elizagilkyson.com/music.htm[/url] .
