Reviewer: Michael Winkler <mchlwinkler_at_gmail.com>
Reviewed April 24, 2020
All The Way Home’s debut album is a sparkling collection of acoustic duets for thinkers, lovers, and anyone who cares about our planet. Nicki Johnson and Craig Barrie share songwriting and vocal duties, with Johnson on ukulele and Barrie playing uke, bass and guitar. They are not afraid to sing soft and sweet, the sonic gentleness counterpointing lyrics that have sharp edges and strong convictions.
Barrie has a remarkable upper range and Johnson can croon in a low tenor. This flexibility is exploited in vocal lines that cross and recross like Lissajous curves, a masterclass in close harmony that never feels obvious or forced. Barrie’s virtuosity is showcased on ‘Dreamy Girl’ when he ascends to counter-tenor range for an almost unearthly high harmony. Johnson has many shining moments, including midway through ‘The Neighbourhood’ she swaps to a higher register and floats effortlessly up to and above Barrie’s vocal line. The effect is like sunlight streaming into a dawn sky.
ATWH’s songs wrap topical heft inside earworm-worthy riffs. Themes range from trickle-down economics on the streets of Seattle and the metaphorical resonances of extreme Melbourne weather, to an artful framing of contemporary romance within Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’. These are grown-up songs, allusive and thoughtful. The most powerful track, ‘Unprotected’, is also the most lyrically direct. Its plea for a humane response to asylum seekers is stated with hypnotic simplicity, interleaved with a chorus that should be sung at a thousand rallies.
The same concern with just causes is given a very different expression on the up-tempo ‘Money Where Your Mouth Is’, a reminder that activists can dance as well as march.
The integration of instruments, voices and ideas is consistently impressive. There is no superfluous showiness. Instead, the sinuous guitar lines and clever uke figures work in the service of the songs. They give the ukulele due gravitas, not just using it as a rhythmic workhorse or a novelty adornment but as a versatile bedrock for song arrangements. The studio production is excellent, unobtrusively capturing and revealing the acoustic warmth. The slight exception to this approach is ‘Holiday Song’ which has lusher production, extra instrumentation and the vocals positioned further back in the mix. It works.
The closing cut is a cover of Lucy Wise’s ‘The Neighbourhood’. Their reading of Wise’s song brings out unexpected elements of poignancy and melancholy; they are older than the songwriter, whose recorded version is peppier, more wide-eyed. In ATWH’s mature take the minor chord shadings seem deeper; these are voices of experience, with a more nuanced understanding of all the things life can throw up, in this or any other neighbourhood. They seem to reach the same conclusion as Lucy Wise about the importance of paying attention to quotidian things and embracing where you live, but it is as if they have reached the same realisation travelling from a different direction.
Songwriters with something to say and artful ways to say it. Songs worth singing, learning and sharing. Voices of contrasting timbre rubbing against each other like branches of tall trees. Lyrics that require unstitching, and riffs that reward the ear. As one of ATWH’s songs states, ‘What you give doubles what you get’ – and this album proves that maxim repeatedly.
File in your collection next to: The Milk Carton Kids, Lucy Wise, Cricket Tell The Weather/Andrea Asprelli, Stacey Earle & Mark Stuart, Richard & Linda Thompson