Linda Perhacs is easily the most celebrated dental hygienist to ever have recorded a classic psychedelic folk album. That album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as Perhacs herself moved on with her life after the record failed and copies of it slowly disappeared from print. The people who heard it, though, did not move on. They made their own editions and passed the album to those they deemed worthy. One of those people was the leader of the prog-metal band Opeth, who did as much as anyone to keep copies of Parallelograms circulating. A legend built. Eventually, someone notified Perhacs.
It’s the kind of tidy capsule story that makes for an excellent set of liner notes, but it’s worth stepping back and reassessing the phenomenal unlikeliness of the tale now that we’re faced with its follow-up, The Soul of All Natural Things. The gulf separating 1970 from now might be dizzying for some, but Perhacs' sense of time is looser than ours, and it doesn’t seem to phase her.
The Soul Of All Natural Things was made with several of Perhacs' contemporary admirers helping her; Julia Holter appears on "Prisms of Glass", and Ramona Gonzalez contributes backing vocals. The resulting album has a fluid, communal energy to it that feels very different from Parallelograms. Perhacs' voice is duskier at 70 than it was at 27, but her range is still surprising, dipping into sultry contralto and leaping easily into higher registers. Her ear for multi-tracked harmonies remains the clearest link back to her first album, and you can hear her quizzical and highly original musical mind operating through them. It's easy to find in them the sound that bewitched latter-day followers like Holter.
What The Soul Of All Natural Things isn't, though, is personal, or small-scale, the way Parallelograms was. Perhacs’ first words on Parallelograms were “And it rains here every day since I came”—a conversational line, right down to the way it begins with “And.” That song followed a series of abstracted thoughts like raindrops across a window pane—"It kinda gets inside you...the silences, I mean. They kinda wrap around you and loosen everything." The first words on the opening title track of The Soul of All Natural Things, meanwhile, are “See the waves that break upon the rocks and stones/ Hear the winds that play upon the ice and foam.” Same focus—the weather, the elements—but the smallness of the human mind has been subtracted. There is no chit-chat to be had here.
In other words, The Soul Of All Natural Things is more purely new age than Perhacs' first record. God as a force, as a character, suffuses these songs, whispering to wind and waves on the title track and carrying the world's "river of souls" on "River of God". "Immunity" is a plea to God to help listen for his love. There is no dogma, just a gentle insistence on slowing down. “Where are you going and if you are going can you take some time for me, just today?" she inquires on "Children". The music is gorgeously recorded, with strings and nylon-string guitar filitering through the mix like the sunlight through the trees in her Topanga Canyon home. But where Parallelograms basked in some cosmic energies, it also offered you a series of conflicting thoughts to puzzle over. The Soul of All Natural Things mostly pats you on the head a little and tell you to calm down.
The best moments are when the song forms fracture a little, and Perhacs' multi-tracked voice is allowed to spiral free. “Prisms of Glass” and “Freely”, two songs in the middle of the record, capture more genuine spiritual feeling with the haunting sound of Perhacs’ interlocking vocals than anything else on the album. On “Song of the Planets”, her voice blurs into a repetition of the words “one” and “sun,” creating the blissful synthesis that the lyrics can only point to. The Soul of All Natural Things is sumptuously recorded and often beautiful, and honestly, it’s wonderful to have it. If it's difficult to envision a 44-year cult of devotion arising from its songs, well, once in this lifetime is probably enough for that kind of achievement.
