For an ostensible singer/songwriter, Joan Shelley doesn’t say too much—or at least, very much that’s concrete, direct, or explicit. On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning. Electric Ursa includes only eight tracks, but still, Shelley foregoes lyrics altogether on the mid-album dream, “Remedios”. Instead, she hums a simple melody over banjo, piano and gathering drums, as though she were singing a child to sleep with the help of a rural chamber ensemble.
“There’s so much I’m longing to say, but there’s nothing to decide,” she offers during the hypnotic sway of the love song “Long Way to Night”, as if to apologize for the impressionistic shape of her own words. No condolences are required, really: Shelley’s primary instrument carries both the grain of a wizened Appalachian lifer and the maneuverability of a young torch singer. Paired with a simpatico band of Louisville musicians, her tone gives the words more meaning and weight than additional details or complete sentences ever could. Shelley’s voice fills the space between her pen’s lines.
Several years ago, Shelley recorded a pair of albums with Maiden Radio, a string trio with fellow Kentucky singers Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell. They largely covered antiquated American ballads, country tunes, and lullabies, mixing in the occasional original or contemporary number to avoid any old-time novelty pratfall. The tunes of Electric Ursa indeed verify a musical education rich with various transcontinental folk renaissances. “River Low” feels like a letter for back home from a mountain pioneer, confessing both loyalty through love and personal growth. “There’s a calmness in my footsteps, in the new lines on my hands,” she sings with welcome resolve. The closer and title track, meanwhile, shakes with the same bucolic reverie of Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, Shelley linking images of “waning autumn light” and “moments given unto the ether” with a see-saw dynamic that makes you lean in close to records like Pink Moon. Her voice rises into sudden, stainless near-shouts and then slinks back toward a whisper. Beneath it, the rippling acoustic guitar of labelmate Nathan Salsburg affords the simple instrument-and-voice affair the ornate elegance of Pentangle.
But the respective placement of these songs at the album’s middle and then at its end feels like a subtle and deliberate revelation. It’s as though Shelley is reminding the listener of her foundation—that is, centuries of Anglo-American songbooks—only after offering a tour of the grand designs it can support. Collectively, those other songs put Shelley in the surprising, esteemed company of recent stateside singers like Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and Angel Olsen, songwriters who use modest observations as the basis for big and bold arrangements. When Shelley nests her voice inside of Electric Ursa’s more complicated productions, she stuns. “Something Small” begins as a simple acoustic trickle, with drums obediently echoing the strums. It builds one piece at a time, the music mirroring Shelley’s slow, steady feeling of being trapped by provincialism, loneliness and fate. “It’s all laid out in front for you to take it,” she sings in the closing chorus, organ pouring in like a wave of unexpected encouragement. The record’s peak, “First of August”, scans as the more mature flipside to a single from For Emma, Forever Ago, the singer suddenly capable of restraint in the face of complete emotional resignation. Of all Electric Ursa’s songs, “First of August” is the most lyrically elusive, with seasons that seem to obey no calendar, a subject that seems decisively indecisive, and an idiosyncratic style that cuts between hillside patois and sophisticated English. But Shelley and the band—all moping drums, crying keys, hand-wringing electric—make the mix of regret, longing and hope tucked into the lines perfectly clear. The feeling is complete and engrossing, even if the words are not.
Electric Ursa isn’t Shelley’s debut, but it is her absolute arrival. On 2012’s Ginko, issued by the Ol Kentuck label of longtime collaborator Daniel Martin Moore, Shelley worked for similar grandeur. But it felt stiff and forced, as though she had an idea of how she wanted to sound but not the experiences she needed to power it. In the interim, though, something seems to have softened and shifted for Shelley, making her less concerned with the perfection of these productions (there is, more often than not, a ripple of room noise and tape hiss in these songs) than their power. Again, it’s an arc and approach not unlike Van Etten’s, where two relatively minor albums preceded a sudden revelation. Where Ginko was too conscious and precious, Eletric Ursa suggests that Shelley is revealing bits and scraps from private journals, leaving out details to protect or piss off the guilty. Sounds like folk music, after all.
