Album Review: Meet Me at the Edge of the World by Over the Rhine

Recorded over six days with the help of Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer Joe Henry, who helmed 2011's The Long Surrender, Meet Me at the Edge of the World features 18 original songs (and one cover), and was inspired by the pre-Civil War farmhouse that Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist purchased in 2005. The duo began stockpiling songs for the project while the ink was still drying on the deed, and by the time they got around to finally laying down the tracks, it had ballooned into a double album. Similar in style and cadence to their previous outing, Meet Me at the Edge of the World falls somewhere between the rural, antebellum folk of Gillian Welch, the evocative, sepia-toned eccentricity of Tom Waits, and the soulful ache of Lucinda Williams.

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Over the RhineMeet Me At The Edge Of The World(Great Speckled Dog)Rating: 3 stars out of 5 This fan financed double studio set is divided by disc one subtitled Sacred Ground, and the other named Blue Jean Sky. They were both recorded in three day stints a month apart by longtime couple vocalist/guitarist Karin Bergquist and multi-instrumentalist Linford Detweiler. Liner notes explain that the songs were inspired by the land around their farm in southern Ohio and, as you might expect with that concept, the music is primarily acoustic, rustic and low key.

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The Ohio-based husband-wife duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist has long been making soul-nourishing music, and the richness only deepens in their new effort in collaboration with producer Joe Henry. The edge of the world the duo seeks seems to be the nexus of body and spirit. In "Called Home," Bergquist uses her gorgeous alto to describe a place "where evening shadows come to fall/on the awful and the beautiful/Every wound you feel that needs to heal." Detweiler gets one of the best couplets on the record in the love song "All Over Ohio" when he reveals: "I still get shivers when I hear you singing down the hall/I'm gonna kiss you all over Ohio." This is a modal window.

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Over the Rhine, A.K.A. the husband and wife duo of Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler has always excelled when it comes to making music of the wrecked and wasted heart-wrenching variety, a sound flush with emotion and the most searing of sentiments. Yet, like Cowboy Junkies, their melodies often tend to be somewhat austere and of such low volume that any immediate impression is generally muted and less than overly expansive.

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