Bonny Light Horseman: Rolling Golden Holy album review — old songs meet modern lyrics

Bonny Light Horseman’s 2020 self-titled debut had the dashing élan of the titular dragoon. On that album, Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman and Eric Johnson made a bright, American-hued sortie on the British traditional songbook, relocating its tales of doomed love and military adventure to somewhere closer to upstate New York. Although the trio’s second album, Rolling Golden Holy — with backing consolidated by JT Bates on drums and Mike Lewis on bass and occasionally saxophone — consists entirely of new compositions, the soundworld is a similar blend of acoustic guitar and harmony vocals. A newly acquired hammered dulcimer prickles its way through the songs as it is passed around from member to member.

In some songs the lyrics evoke a world more modern than the music. On “Summer Dream”, its references to “Tupelo honey” asserting a clear lineage to Van Morrison’s Woodstock residency, Mitchell seems to conjure an East Coast equivalent to Lana del Rey’s Californian imaginarium. “Smell of rolled cigarette,” she sings, her voice sharpening from the breathy chorus, Bates’s drumming lagging a microsecond behind the beat. “And your hair when it was wet/Drippin’ on the kitchen floor/Slippin’ through the screen door.”

In “California”, pushed by a triple guitar lead with mandolin to boot, Johnson sings one of the album’s prettiest hooks. The narrator and his love are “ridin’ . . . slippin’ and a-slidin’” — another nod to Morrison — and simultaneously trusting in and abandoning the land of plenty. “Comrade Sweetheart”, in line with the incongruous Brechtian juxtaposition of its title, moves from laced-up boots and loosened braids to the binding up of wounds.

There are callbacks to older songs as well. “Sweetbread”, which bubbles with banjo patterns and mumbling tenor saxophone from Lewis, is a take on the traditional “Jack of Diamonds”, the Texas gambling song popularised by Blind Lemon Jefferson. The original song (at least in its 20th-century incarnation) features a railroad engineer; here the central character is driving “just to ride the road/Engines running”. Mitchell and Johnson chorus, cynically, hedonistically, “Blue sky, Lord, when I die”.

“Someone to Weep For Me”, like a fable by Ambrose Bierce, interpolates the old hymn “Nearer My God to Thee”, placing it in the mouth of a 19th-century cavalryman, dreading his fate and dreaming of Jacob’s Ladder. And “Fair Annie” wraps a response to the bleak Child ballad of the same name in another extravagantly pretty melody, rendering it timeless and clear.

★★★★☆

‘Rolling Golden Holy’ is released by 37d03d