alternative folk · 2011
Barton Hollow
The Civil Wars
Two voices twisting so tightly around each other that you lose track of who's singing which line — that's the trick The Civil Wars built an entire record on in 2011.
"Poison & Wine" makes the case in miniature: Joy Williams and John Paul White trade a chorus that admits "I don't love you, but I always will," harmony doing the work of a marriage falling apart and holding together at once. The arrangements stay deliberately spare — an acoustic guitar, a little piano, the space between two people — so the pair have nowhere to hide and never seem to want to. Then the title track drops that restraint entirely, stomping into blues-rock menace about a man fleeing a killing. The distance between that snarl and the whispered ballads is the album's whole argument: intimacy and violence sung in the same close harmony.