(Righteous Babe/Shock)

Woke up this morning, got the Greek mythology blues

Hadestown started life as a musical – Mitchell calls it a ‘folk opera’ – that retold the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a Depression-style dustbowl setting with a ragtime jazz and blues score. The album restructures the musical and re-casts it, although Mitchell’s girlish voice, authentically awkward in its youthfulness, none of that “I wish I was Björk” put-on all the ingenues are doing, is still that of Eurydice. Justin Vernon from Bon Iver sings Orpheus, the poet who in this updated version of the story can’t pay the power bills. He still has to descend into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, but here it’s a mining town instead of the afterlife. Ani DiFranco sings Persephone as the bar-owner of Hadestown, selling blue sky in a bottle to underworld-dwellers, and her smoky, speakeasy singing is the best she’s sounded in years. Hades is given the voice of a creaking door on an empty house by bluesman Greg Brown, a tone somewhere between Tom Waits and Christopher Walken that threatens to steal the show. The story is classically simple: the sad beauty of Orpheus’s music convinces Hades to let him take Eurydice back to the surface, but only if he swears not to look back. As usual when you deal with the devil, it doesn’t end well. In updating the story Mitchell fills its gaps, making Eurydice the focus rather than just a waif to be rescued and cribbing from The Threepenny Opera to round out her motivation. It’s ambitious and well-realised, conjuring a world in your head while you’re listening so vividly that you can practically see the performances. They all look excellent.

****½

JODY MACGREGOR

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