Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
If you are going to do an album of cover songs by one of the greatest duos of American popular music then it not only has to be good, it has to be sensational and given a new twist. Thankfully Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the folk singer Will Oldham, have not only managed this but have done it with such style and with due deference to the Everly Brothers that the songs could well have been written in the last year given their freshness and contemporary feel.
Quite rightly titled What The Brothers Sang, the album echoes majestically what the Everly Brothers strived to get across in their music and in pursuit of their own American dream. The Everly Brothers are not considered one of the finest musical partnerships for nothing and it takes monumental courage to try and replicate that haunting melancholic beauty and bring it out of the bars and backroom dives of downcast America and into people homes. Both Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy take the harmony that the Everly Brothers had and match it stride for stride and in some cases outdo what Don and Phil Everly could have ever imagined.
What The Brothers Sang is a piece of ethereal splendour with a touch of the dramatic blues, indie folk that makes Dawn McCarthy and Will Oldham highly prized in their genre and on songs such as Kris Kristofferson’s Breakdown, Tony Romero’s superb Milk Train and the exquisitely written Poems, Prayers and Promises, the pair match the intensity and imagery in which Don and Phil gave to the tunes. It is startling though to hear some of Don Everly’s own creations, such as So Sad and Omaha being sang with the same amount of passion and assuredly by Ms McCarthy and in a gender distorting way that gives greater significance to Will Oldham’s own performance.
A wonderful album that deserves greater appreciation by a larger audience but in which will pass by the greater majority of music lovers, especially in the U.K., What The Brothers Sang is an album brimming with music splendour.
Ian D. Hall