Over The Rhine: Faithfully Dangerous
[purchase]
I fell in love with Ohio-based band Over The Rhine in the new social media millennium, thanks to various bloggers' fondness for their inimitably beautiful, dreamy lounge-pop of what has been, for the last 15 years, a married singing/songwriting duo. But founders and sonic core Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler had fallen in love long before, way back in the mid-nineties, making it easy to shed their fellow founding members just after releasing this song on their two-CD set Good Dog, Bad Dog without significantly shifting their ability to remain vibrant contributors to the modern and highly melodic post-lounge alt-pop genre.
Indeed, though I only just discovered this song last month after a posting over at Bottom of the Glass, that it was the work of the same Over The Rhine I know and love from such incredible albums as The Trumpet Child, Snow Angels, and several sets of Live From Nowhere best-of-the-year compilations was evident from the first measure - which is to say, there are close similarities between this full, beautiful, and haunting early work and the stuff I fell in love with in the last couple of albums.
Such sonic consistency is rare, and only underscores just how much the paired sensibilities of multi-instrumentalists and composers Bergquist and Detweiler, who married in 1996 and now live together on a pre-Civil War farm when not touring and recording with the likes of Joe Henry, Lucinda Williams, My Morning Jacket, Hem, Bob Dylan, and Cowboy Junkies, have always been at the core of the band.