Title: Opulent follow-up
Product review: Recording for this album finished in New York on 9 September 2001, two days before the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Shanksville PA attacks, and it is dedicated to all the victims. Some of the songs seem to allude to the event, especially the song Motherland, although obviously they could not without a very uncanny prescience. Perhaps it is the overall mood of wistful melancholia that captures something of the zeitgeist.Motherland continues in the opulent style of its 1998 predecessor Ophelia, with an exemplary team of supporting musicians. The inimitable Mavis Staples helps out on the ironic gospel-flavoured St Judas and on the devil-banishing Build A Levee, while the beautiful song Henry Darger benefits from a full-scale orchestra, arranged and conducted by Stephen Barber.A work of true quality, although a couple of tracks lack don't go that extra mile in inspiration
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