Night, Sleep, Death

Night, Sleep, Death, the third outing from the Wingdale Community Singers revolves, in part, around Walt Whitman, specifically the poem A Clear Midnight, from which the album's title was lifted. Steeped in the traditions of folk, gospel, and country, yet brimming with contemporary urban imagery, singer/songwriter Hannah Marcus, author Rick Moody, and Gastr del Sol guitarist David Grubbs, along with special guests Jolie Holland, Tanya Donelly, and Oneida's Kid Millions, have crafted another enigmatic set of modern folk songs that swap the porch swing for the front stoop. Pretty much evenly split between Marcus' resonant croon and Moody's nervous murmur, the overall wordiness, which alternates between completely banal and terribly intimate, can be a bit disarming, but there's a deep vein of empathy that runs through stand-out cuts like the pensive, Linda Thompson-esque "Passing Stranger," the stalwart "Ole Rudy," and the lovely, Whitman-inspired three-song suite ("Night, Sleep, Death, and the Stars," "No Rest," "Happy Ending"), that helps to offset the vinyl-only release's sillier offerings like "Use as Directed" and "Hunan #3." Grubbs' inventive guitar work, much of which is acoustic, is a joy to listen to throughout, and the group's myriad harmonies, which don’t always work, yet ultimately win the listener over with their sheer ambition (the entire last half of "So What [Andy's Lament]" serves as a prime example), go a long way in imbuing Night, Sleep, Death with the kind of humanity and spiritual self-preservation that would have pleased the Long Island-born poet whose prose graces its cover.