As that track indicates, Stilhed has a disturbing ability to distill the relationship between folk (traditional music sung by mostly working class people) and folk (coffee shop music sung by mostly wealthier people). The first is predicated on faith, in God and in a way of life. The second is predicated on faith too...faith, that is, in those who believe in that God, and in that way of life. Traditional folk is about community and connection; coffee-house folk, (or its latest iteration, freak folk) is about the lack of community and connection, and a unfulfillable longing to find both again.

This is why, on Stilhed’s album, bits and pieces of traditional music drift about in pretty washes of anemic helplessness. The assertive demands, the boasting, the sense of definitiveness and technical, formal assurance which characterizes much of traditional folk, from blues to gospel to bluegrass, is drained away, and what’s left is floating fragments, each of which is held up as a kind of severed totem, pointing off-disk to an unattainable meaning and truth. It’s not an accident that many of the effects on the album sound like the hiss and pop of old vinyl. Instead of fetishizing performers or people, Stilhed is idolizing their aesthetic products; not the actual beliefs, but the art which represents those beliefs. The album ends up as a kind of breathy ode to capitalism — that all-purpose acid which dissolves individuals and community and leaves behind a residue of consumable bits and static.

Despite all that, I’m not actually arguing that traditional folk is always good, or that the coffee-house variety is necessarily bad. Blues can often be boringly straightforward, while the weirdly distanced artificial longing for a childlike atavism in, say, Linda Perhacs is well-nigh irresistible. And, indeed, there are moments on Stilhed’s album that are lovely in a Perhacian mode — like, for instance, the eerie multi-tracked wailing on “Howl,” where the vocals seem to be desperately trying to form sense before collapsing back into fractured ululation. In general, though, I find Stilhed’s dissection of her sources altogether too bloodless. The distance between herself and the material ends up seeming less like a lover’s abandonment and more like a surgeon’s bored detachment. To me, at least, listening to this album, Stilhed began to resemble a little the vivisector who dismantled a cat in a misguided attempt to discover if it had a soul.

Recommended Tracks: “Howl,” “Speak Easy,” “First”

-Noah Berlatsky