Canter Bridge

Every once in a while, trudging along in this vale of tears, one stumbles upon an artistic statement so fresh and compelling that one has to stop in a clearing, put a foot up on a log, and pause to wonder how he got this far without knowing about this.

Sons of Korah and their 2002 release called simply shelter make for such a wonder-filled moment. From Lillian Carland’s eery and Edvard Munch-esque artwork to the spare minimalism of this Aussie band’s revisitation of the biblical psalms, a moment for head-scratching ponderment upon the forceful before and after of it all is upon us.

shelter is part of a larger project to recover the spirituality of the biblical psalms. This midcourse offering give us lush, contemplative, deeply unsettling renditions of ten of them? Did I say ‘unsettling’? The word calls for comment, for something in these melodies deeply settles the soul. Yet the rhetorical probing of Psalm 30 (track five, ‘Whom have I in heaven but you?) ushers in a peace that can only be truly savored following as it does upon the rhetorical violence of Psalm 35 (track one, ‘Contend, LORD, with those who contend with me; LORD and fight against those who fight against me’).

Each restatement of a single psalm, if pondered and allowed the time necessary to practice its craft upon the listening soul, reshapes reality just as the psalms are meant to do. Whether each syllable of every last one hundred fifty of them has been committed to memory—an enduring tradition that has withstood the onslaught of MTV and YouTube—or indeed if this is a first confrontation (the word is merited) with the psalms, Sons of Korah employs their artful and unpretentious musicality to the shaping of persons under the deeply disturbing beauty that are the tehillim, as the Hebrew tradition still labels this compendium of words delivered back to/at God.

The key in wrestling with the psalms and their presentation to others is not to level them. Christian interpreters in particular too often rush forward in two directions. First, they find Christ between every third or fourth syllable and then transpose the psalm in to a flat, predictive code that fore-indicated (the word foresaw is too good for this). The second, arguably more damaging, move is to flatten the agony and even occasionally the ecstasy out of the psalm. The motive more often than not is that God would now allow one of his own to fall into such pain, anger, doubt, or desperation. ‘Look’, the instinct hurries to convince itself, ‘over here there’s a much more comforting word. Surely that’s the operative one, not this dark, ambiguous, unsettling finish.’

Yet God manifestly does allow his sons and daughters to fall into such straits. Yet in their darkness he gifts them a gift: words for speaking back to him or at him or against him. But, always, speak.

Sons of Korah do not indulge these interpretive and spirtual dead ends. They studiously allow each psalm to be what it is, an achievement to which I am tempted to append the adjective ‘glorious’. Perhaps they would refuse that. Perhaps they should, for they are self-evidently servants of their material rather than its masters.

This reviewer is left with no option but to pursue this thing via Sons of Korah’s other albums. But I shall not forget this first encounter, this illumination, this accompaniment, this unsettling stillness. Before and after.