They're Calling Me Home

Made in Irish lockdown by two musicians stranded an ocean from where they were born, this is a record that turns homesickness into a working argument about how far a melody can travel and still belong to someone.

Monteverdi's "Si Dolce è'l tormento" sits a few tracks from "O Death," and Giddens sings both as if they came off the same porch, her voice bending Italian baroque into the same aching plea she brings to Appalachian dread. Turrisi's frame drums and accordion are the connective tissue, insisting these traditions were never as separate as the map suggests. When they close on "Amazing Grace," stripped to voice and drone, the hymn stops being American and becomes simply human breath in an empty room. The whole thing plays like a letter written by people who suspect that home is a tune you carry, not a place you can get back to.