Canter Bridge

You may never listen to another Christmas album like Over the Rhine’s Snow Angels. You may end up listening to no other.

OtR brings to Yuletide their bedazzling touch with the blues and their stupendous way with a lyric. Christmas is before all else a Christian celebration, which to this reviewer causes a bit of a squirm when devoutly secular artists toss off an album to the cause (are you out there, Sarah McLachlan?). OtC does not posture itself within that bandwidth we call `contemporary Christian’. So what do they do with, say, a manger?

The short answer: lots.

OtR is not so much Christian in the popular sense as they are theological in the existential sense. Rather than traffic in the clichés of a religious movement they probe to the deep structure from which those movements emerge and, in their best moments, nourish themselves. The OtR soul has trafficked heavily not only in biblical motifs but also the (post-)Amish and camp meeting millieus that sink their roots deeply into that material and its ever-renewing traditions.

What to do, then, with the season?:

In `Darling (Christmas is Coming)’:

Tear these thorns from my heart
Help the healing to start
Let’s set this old world free
Let’s start with you and me

Darlin’ Christmas is coming
Salvation bells are ringing
Darlin’ Christmas is coming
Do you believe in angels singing
Darin’ the snow is falling
Falling like forgiveness from the sky

The tentacles of that last phrase reach out in several directions, several of them organically connected to what Christians still like to call `Advent’. The fierce warrior angel Gabriel and a number of things virtually fall from the sky in the gospels’ infancy narratives. Forgiveness works nicely as an abbreviation of the lot.

`White Horse’ is carol cum lullaby cum hymn cum revelation. Its lyric, its lyricism, and its harmony move old souls as though they weighed but a pebble. Soaked in allusions to both biblical testaments, it is a particularly inviting example of those messianic catenae that have exercised New Testament scholars.

Or this line of thinking from the `more-here-than-what-you-thought drivenness of `Here It Is’:

When they blow Gabriel’s horn
Rip fiction from fact
I want to get caught
In some radical act

Of love and redemption
The sound of warm laughter
Some true conversation
With a friend or my lover

Somewhere down the road
We’ll lift up our glass
And toast the moment
And moments past

The heartbreak and laughter
The joy and the tears
The scary beauty
Of what’s right here

But don’t settle too deeply into the theological for in `North Pole Man’ Karin Bergquist peels the paint off your winter lair. Angels blush.

Indeed, angels may blush from start to finish of this extraordinary Christmas collection. If not for the ardent sensuality of Bergquist’s occasional blues—less frequently heard here than in OtR’s ordinary repertoire—then for the sheer glory of words about heavenly doings well spoken and deliciously sung.