Nearly halfway through “Jeano,” the ruminative opening track on the third album by folklorists and folksingers Anna & Elizabeth, there is a quiet burst of chirruping birds. They don’t sound like real birds; more like a sample of birds looped into the music, reinforcing the song’s burbling outdoor ambience. It’s both naturalistic and blatantly synthetic, which may be the whole point. “Jeano” is about yearning for the impossible—a lover’s return from the bloody battlefield, a world untainted by war—and that piped-in birdsong, evoking someplace long ago and far away, only increases the sense of loss. It’s as much of a transporting daydream as the lyrics of the chorus: “If I were Queen of France or still better Pope of Rome/I’d have no fighting men abroad, nor weeping maids at home.”
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle are fascinated by such curious sounds, and they’ve filled The Invisible Comes to Us with drones and loops, sequencers and synthesizers, post-rock woodwinds and migraine distortion. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis (Okkervil River, Cuddle Magic), they set “Virginia Rambler,” a tale of sexual treachery, to a needling drumbeat that gradually turns itself inside out, as though leading the singers into the deep woods. “Irish Patriot” opens with a shimmer of sound like sunlight through bare trees, then adds a flutter of saxophone and a cacophony of distorted voices. Deconstructing and then reconstructing itself, the song has the feel of journey and arrival, subtly enacting the theme of the lyrics.
Coming after their self-titled 2015 effort, which set Anna & Elizabeth’s voices in an almost entirely acoustic setting, the wider, weirder palette of The Invisible Comes to Us is much more audacious, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do. They’re not the first artists to marry the old and the new or to insist that the electronic might sound right at home with the acoustic. Rather, they’re part of a larger wave of folk acts like House and Land in North Carolina, Lankum in Dublin, Stick in the Wheel in London, even Bon Iver up in Eau Claire—all of whom are reframing old folk music for the present moment. Like those groups, Anna & Elizabeth don’t write songs so much as they unearth them, researching old compositions in dusty songbooks and academic collections—in this case, the archives of song collector Helen Hartness Flanders, housed at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Moreover, they insist that these old songs can hold an array of sounds, that the arrhythmic skronk of a saxophone or the Doppler rhythm of a sequencer might sound as natural as the crunch of dead leaves underfoot or the chirp of birds overhead. Anna & Elizabeth’s most extreme experiment is “By the Shore,” a cut-and-paste collage of spliced voices, spoken incantations, and excerpted noise (and one of several songs on The Invisible Comes to Us whose lyrics feature roaming men and pining women). It’s exhilarating to hear a folk song chopped and screwed, fragmented like a Laurie Anderson composition, ripped and torn at the seams, even if this particular arrangement is ostentatious by design, too showy on an album that makes such subtle and sophisticated use of sound.
The Invisible Comes to Us ends right where it begins: Closer “Margaret” is built on an excerpt from Flanders’ field recording of a Vermont woman named Margaret Shipman singing “Jeano” circa 1940. It certainly sounds 80 years old, with all the ambient hisses and scratches that old 78s accrue with age. Whether those are native to the recording or whether they were added later with the organ and guitar is beside the point. What matters is the singer and her husky, tender, graceful voice echoing through the decades. It’s a surprisingly poignant moment, exploring the mysteries of the past and the unchanged realities of the present.
