When the Roses Come Again

With When the Roses Come Again, finger-style guitarist extraordinaire Daniel Bachman has officially ventured beyond the local solar system and crossed into interstellar space where, like NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, he is maintaining communication with fellow Earthlings. In contrast with 2022’s Almanac Behind, which grimly charted rapid environmental change through a collage of field recordings and filtered instrumental tracks, When the Roses Come Again represents a decidedly more elegiac, poetical and frankly palatable sonic adventure.

Recorded on a laptop in a cabin Bachman was helping to restore in the Virginia woods, the album’s 15 tracks are stitched together to form a sequential song cycle. Their titles, such as ‘Neath the shadow, down the meadow’, ‘Someone straying, long delaying’ and ‘All their sadness turned to gladness’, are taken from lyrics to the folk song ‘When the Roses Come Again’, released by the Carter Family in 1933, close to the beginning of their career. Using guitar, banjo, fiddle, homemade mouth bow, percussion pad and various electronic effects, Bachman improvised and then post-produced a patchwork quilt of beguiling melodies, frayed harmonies, ambient tonal colours and tranquilising rhythmic textures, augmented in parts by handbells and harmonium samples played by Tyler Magill. With a soundscape closer to Terry Riley than John Fahey, When the Roses Come Again is supremely habitable for fans of both artists.