Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Perhaps for the first time since the dark days that shrouded Europe and much of the world, we are going through a period of time in human history that 90 percent of us are feeling an emotion that is akin to sorrow, a grief that we cannot explain, a regret we cannot describe, an unhappiness we don’t know how to shed; and yet we fight on, smiles plastered to our faces as if positioned there by a child with a crayon, an empty laugh forever hanging on our lips.
The Common Nation Of Sorrow, an area in which to discuss deeper feelings than we normally allow ourselves, where to unburden ourselves would be a relief, and where those who dare suggest that to feel such emotions is to embrace self-pity are given a dose of the medicine they prescribe without thought for the torment they have inflicted upon each one of us.
This new common nation has a soundtrack, a leader to whom the listener should embrace and hold aloft. A woman of substantive reasoning, who has lived with the political ideals in which the next generations that come along can look to if we are to survive as a species, for in Rachel Baiman there is a sage, a prophet, a musician who can walk the line with hope and truth in her music, and as her album, the Common Nation Of Sorrow, inspires a rage, that sorrow turns outward, it unshackles fear and loathing and instead puts the spotlight of reveal, on illumination, on love.
These are more than a series of songs, these are green pastures, an avenue of rare flowers tended by a gardener with warmth and feeling. Through tracks such as Some Strange Notion, the reflective and insightful Annie, the melancholy driven She Didn’t Know What To Sing About Anymore, Bad Debt, Bitter, and Old Flame, the sense that there is a plan to not only wipe away an old, fragile order with something more discerning, with a program not leaning towards constant disappointment, is palpable and badly needed by all.
By the end of the decade the target should be to destroy completely the false narrative dictated by greed, and as long as we, the 90 percent have people and artists such as Rachel Baiman guiding the music alongside the planning, then we will not go far wrong.
A sublimely performed album, a musician of dexterity and passion, Rachel Baiman has at her fingers a philosophy worth its weight in reason.
Ian D. Hall