Carson McHone – Pentimento (Merge) (13th Floor Album Review)
Carson McHone’s fourth album Pentimento arrives like a living manuscript, its pages alive with shifting landscapes, salt air, and the grain of skin.
It follows the Austin-born songwriter’s path from the honky-tonk twang of Goodluck Man through the expansive folk-rock of Carousel and the intimate, Ontario-recorded Still Life. Since relocating from Texas to Canada she has worked closely with producer and partner Daniel Romano, a collaboration that has broadened her sonic palette without dulling the sharp, poetic clarity of her early work.
From the opening seconds of Pentimento she signals ambition. A voice recites Ralph Waldo Emerson over field recorded birds which dissolves into piano and guitar chords, and then Winter Breaking bursts from pastoral folk into a rock-driven gallop. Throughout the record McHone keeps balancing what might seem opposites: earth and air, poetry and noise, stillness and momentum, constantly revealing new connections and new layers to her central concern: how song emerges and how it brings us together. Her singing brings a quiet intensity to this record from beginning to end.
The music is physical and unpredictable. Pastoral folk, spoken word over drones, folk rock, and experimental Americana rub against each other and heighten the impact of each track. Percussion rattles like restless thoughts, guitars move from bright finger-picking to sudden distortion, sometimes within a single track. Downhill remembers blood and asphalt as the tempo lurches between folk reverie and rock urgency. In Idiom a slow bass anchors a series of questions until mandolin and electric guitar push forward and McHone cries, “What use are the words without any voice?” Strings and low drones act like a tide across the album, tugging at her clear, steady vocal while natural sounds like the hush of waves in Wake You Well become part of the instrumentation.
McHone’s writing matches that sonic layering. Lyrics often feel like paint laid over an older image, as alluded to by the album title, which refers to hidden strokes on a canvas. Skin and touch recur, “blood in her teeth,” “press your strangeness to my skin.” Seeds, soil and seasons mark time in Fruits of My Tending and the brief vignette Abstract Spring, grounding these songs in cycles of growth and decay. Even when McHone turns inward to consider art itself, her images remain rooted in the physical world.
The album’s second half slows into something almost devotional. The Canvas sets a rock riff beneath whispered intimacy, “And time was our language, spoken through touch” before falling to near silence. Fruits of My Tending builds from quiet reflection to a furious electric strum, voices and instruments pulling against each other in a modern folk incantation. After this storm, Lucentum drifts on gentle guitar and cymbal shimmer, as if the sand itself were keeping time. Throughout McHone’s voice shines the emotional tone of each song, whether it’s warmly intimate or hauntingly distant.
The closing suite carries a quiet spirituality. Wake You Well unfolds like a moonlit prayer held together by a low drone while violins slip in and out with faint dissonance. McHone offers consolation, “perhaps some day our paths will cross / and if you feel as if you’re lost / not so alone as once you thought.” Triumph of the Heart lets her voice rise and fall over the faintest guitar strum as she sings of love as “a dance of wonder so divine… this energy is of the sea.”
Finally, the spoken-word miniature Create Away leads into September Song, where marching drums and accordion gather a full band in celebration of bringing songs into existence: “to dream a song you have never ever heard and sing it into being” and McHone’s final fading line affirms that “the song is unending.”
Pentimento is a meditation on creation itself, how songs, like paintings or sculpture, carry the ghosts of the natural world where they are made. By the end just like that first birdsong that became something larger, we have a sense that every natural sound, sea, sand, and even silence, has a place in music’s scale. This is a cathartic, meditative, and richly textured album that rewards listening as a whole. Its tangible details and poetic reflection on the process of creating songs ultimately celebrates how words, body, landscape, and sound merge to create something more profound – where you can no longer tell where the physical world ends and the song begins.
John Bradbury
Pentimento is out now on Merge Records
