{"id":14357,"date":"2018-04-04T05:30:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T09:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14357"},"modified":"2018-04-03T10:08:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T14:08:23","slug":"album-review-hannah-kaminer-heavy-magnolias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/04\/04\/album-review-hannah-kaminer-heavy-magnolias\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Hannah Kaminer — Heavy Magnolias"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Hannah Kaminer’s career as a performing musical artist only began in 2014 when she took part in the Brown Bag Songwriting competition. The Asheville singer-guitarist earned a near-immediate return on her investment, winning both first place and crowd favorite honors. Her 2015 album Acre by Acre<\/i> was produced by Julian Dreyer at Echo Mountain Studio, and Kaminer raised funds for the project through a Kickstarter campaign. A little more than a year after the release of that album, Kaminer was awarded a Regional Artist Project Grant; the grant \u2013 along with another extremely successful crowd funding campaign \u2013 allowed her to return to Echo Mountain to make her most recent album, Heavy Magnolias<\/i>.<\/p>\n

This time around, Kaminer puts to use all of the knowledge she gained in the making of Acre by Acre<\/i>; on Heavy Magnolias<\/i>, she shares production credits with Dreyer. The production values on Heavy Magnolias<\/i> are more finely textured than before, yet overall quite similar to those employed on Acre by Acre.<\/i> But then there’s no reason to tinker endlessly with something when it works.<\/p>\n

And it does indeed work. Kaminer’s sweet songs are often tinged with melancholy and a soulful yearning; the song titles telegraph the mood even before the disc is removed from its thoughtfully designed packaging. While the instrumentation is note-perfect and sympathetic \u2013 especially Jackson Dulaney’s pedal steel \u2013 it’s Kaminer’s keen ability to paint word-pictures that remains among her greatest assets.<\/p>\n

With a writing style that walks a fine line between literal storytelling and deeply impressionistic lyricism, Kaminer manages to write songs that (one suspects) are very personal, but that nonetheless resonate with a wide swath of listeners. In the lyrics of \u201cJust a Man,\u201d Kaminer sings, \u201cI know a man’s just a man \/ Just a man and you can’t \/ Make him what he ain’t.\u201d She’s certainly not the first to make such an observation, but when she sings the words in her lilting, crystalline-clear voice with just a touch of Appalachian lilt, one senses that she learned the lesson the hard way.<\/p>\n

And so it goes with the other twelve songs on Heavy Magnolias<\/i>. The arrangements of the songs are pleasantly varied, but once again, the instrumentation exists in clear service of Kaminer’s voice and words. The songwriter makes use of a slightly unconventional time signature for \u201cLost Boys,\u201d a tune that is \u2013 despite its title \u2013 atypically upbeat, even playful.<\/p>\n

\u201cKnoxville\u201d is a welcome, modern-day slice of classic country, with keening vocal harmonies and a winning melody; it’s a standout track. In the liner notes for Heavy Magnolias<\/i>, Kaminer offers sincere thanks to a long list of friends and supporters, but the mention of Amanda Anne Platt stands out; it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Platt’s own work serves as a kind of inspiration to Kaminer, most notably on \u201cKnoxville.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both \u201cCity Song\u201d and the album closer, \u201cSet a Table\u201d are commissioned works, illustrating \u2013 if the point even needs to be made \u2013 that Hannah Kaminer’s skills as a singer, songwriter and performer are so recognized that her supporters are ready to hear her new music even before she has written it. With the March 18 release of Heavy Magnolias<\/i>, those supporters will be richly rewarded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hannah Kaminer’s career as a performing musical artist only began in 2014 when she took part in the Brown Bag Songwriting competition. The Asheville singer-guitarist earned a near-immediate return on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14358,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,49,65],"tags":[237,3387],"class_list":["post-14357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americana","category-new-release","category-review","tag-asheville","tag-hannah-kaminer","cat-6-id","cat-49-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14359,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14357\/revisions\/14359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}