Album Review: Carrie Hassler & Hard Rain – CHHR2

Energetic and crisp, CHHR 2 is a hard-driving bluegrass album that showcases one of the most talented and imaginative sets of musicians in the genre today. From the album’s opening number, the beautifully sentimental “I Can Go Back Anytime,” Josh Miller’s relentless banjo carves out a sound that strikes a brilliant balance between traditional and progressive, while Jamie Harper’s fiddle underscores a series of tracks that sound familiar but which can only be described as undeniably fresh.

It is that freshness which distinguishes Hard Rain from its contemporaries. Bluegrass can quickly wane from engaging to stale, from exhilarating to repetitive, and its arrangements often feel like generations-old retreads. So-called Progressive Bluegrass (or ‘Newgrass’) attempts to address this, but incorporating electric instruments and typically un-bluegrass arrangements and musical structures often results in a sound that is so far removed from its roots that it hardly sounds like bluegrass at all.

Therein is the artistic genius of CHHR 2: while Hard Rain may be classified as a Progressive Bluegrass band, its sophomore album generally adheres to the genre’s musical traditions while, at the same time, packing just enough twists and turns to keep things from getting boring. Even more importantly, the individual tracks themselves are so well delineated that each retains its own character and remains uniquely identifiable. “Fickle Heart,” with its persistent banjo track, stands in firm contrast to the nearly mainstream-country “Country Strong,” which is the antithesis of the mournful “If These Walls Could Talk.”

That strong diversity makes for a thoroughly enjoyable album–even though lead singer Hassler’s vocals sometimes feel out of sync with the instrumentation.

Hassler is no hack of a vocalist by any means–she sings with confidence and a high degree of technical proficiency. Indeed, she sounds great on CHHR 2. The trouble is, she just doesn’t sound especially country, and she especially doesn’t sound very bluegrass. Rich and engaging though her voice may be, it possesses not a single drop of high lonesome.

When she sings “I’m country strong, hard to break/Like the ground I grew up on,” her diction is clear and precise, her tones are smooth, her pronunciation is unaccented, and it just doesn’t mesh with the message of the song or with the music which surrounds it. In the midst of a flurry of acoustic, hillbilly music, Hassler often sounds like an out of place suburbanite.

There are two songs on the album in which this effect is particularly drawn out. “I Don’t Want to Wake Up,” which finds the narrator struggling with a cancer diagnosis, and “Stranger in his Mind,” a ballad about living with a spouse who has Alzheimer’s, are both smartly written, and both provide CHHR 2 with a portion of the overall contrast which makes the record so artistically intriguing. At the same time, however, those themes are not typically bluegrass (or typically country), and they emphasize the fact that Hassler sounds more like a folk singer than a bluegrass singer; that she would be more suited to a coffee shop stage than a back-porch jam.

That is not to say that a bluegrass or country singer’s voice must be bathed in twang, or that the material and themes of those genres are, or should be, limited in scope to a narrow list of accepted ideas. To the contrary, Hassler and her band deserve a great deal of credit for making such an adventurous record, and for daring to tackle such tough, outside-the-framework topics.

And although Hassler’s voice may not ooze country like Alison Krauss, that doesn’t hamper its ability to effectively convey emotion–which it does successfully throughout.

Recommended Tracks: “I Can Go Back Anytime“, “Fickle Heart“, “Devil’s Den”

Carrie Hassler & Hard Rain on MySpace