CD Review

The Nields
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now
(Zoe/Rounder)

The music business has chewed up the Nields and spit them out. A lot of other groups would have packed it in, turned tail and run, or at the very least become bitter in their disappointment. But The Nields have returned with as good an album as they've ever made - in my opinion better - and it is as full of irrepressible joy as their earliest work.

From the opening lines of "Jeremy Newborn Street," the album bears the trademark of Nerissa's Nields' writing - the unfettered musical sensibility of Paul McCartney and the psychological complexity of Lennon (and there are plenty of nods to George Martin's production - especially echoes of Sergeant Pepper).At the same time, the unusual quality of Katryna and Nerissa's voices tends to draw us into a world that is completely theirs. In this opening song, the narrator waits for a presumably romantic rendezvous that never materializes. But as the song goes on, it's less clear that this has to be a romantic rendezvous.Waiting on a felicitously named street, her expectant state leads to a kind of epiphany. Instead of the absurdity of "Waiting for Godot," a friendly power begins to be immanent in everything. In the end, she helps a woman with directions, and this small act of kindness is somehow magnified by the joyous energy of the song until it becomes almost saintlike. It suddenly seems as if the song is - God help me - theological and is saying that it's simply in the waiting for salvation that we are saved....

There are more religious/spiritual overtones throughout the album. There's "Mercy Street" - a haven of rest and recovery - and the gospel song "Keys to the Kingdom" - another song whose theme is that salvation isn't somethingyou have to wait for: "You had the keys to the kingdom all along." There's also the achingly beautiful love song "One Hundred Names." In "One Hundred Names" the beloved is the sunlight, music - everything. It's hard to dismiss the feeling that, like the Song of Songs, this is or could be a love song to God. At the very least, the beloved here has a kind of divine omnipresence and invisibility - a strange physical absence. It's a theme that's even carried in the neatly self-referential title, If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now, since by listening, you do live here and suddenly, you are home.

All this, as I say, is what I admire about the Nields' work and it's why you'll find among their fans at any given concert hordes of teenagers and dozens of couples in their 40s, 50s, 60s who appreciate the blend of youthful ebullience, wisdom and poetic craft. Like Larkin, the Nields continue to be folk music because their songs are stories in which the characters are complex and fully human in all dimensions. They steer between the idealism of sentimental folk and the nihilism of folk-punk. -HB