JULY 2009 ONLINE EDITORIALS

Gregory Alan Isakov - This Empty Northern Hemisphere

By Nathan Harper

Isakov is good. So good that if I were a 17-year-old girl, I’d be crushing on him – hard. He’s introspective, contemplative, and, when he needs to be, dark. Who could resist that? He garners this swoon by way of a sound that is patient, insightful and somber, and this time around he’s written 13 tracks of folky, melancholic ear candy. Perhaps most impressively, Gregory Alan Isakov even lives up to the burden of pretense he himself created by asking listeners to enunciate eight syllables every time they say his name.

And yet you do want to say it, and might even repeat it to a friend, because his voice has the kind of haunting sonorousness that could make his songs appropriate for either a funeral or a wedding, and very likely indie coffee shops will have This Empty Northern Hemisphere in heavy rotation. As a writer his topics rarely stray from love and its ugly twins, despair and deception. But, thankfully, this isn’t the whiny, overwrought disparaging of the emo generation, but rather, it is a purposeful, lyrical prose one might expect from an older, more mature artist.

The album’s lush instrumentation uses the standard folk guitar-and-voice combination as a canvas on which to paint rich but subdued hues of strings, percussion, pianos and even the occasional vibraphone. The care for arrangement put into each track evokes Andrew Bird, as does Isakov’s frequent and well-executed use of male-female vocal harmonies throughout the album. Isakov is clearly an ambitious musician, and on this latest opus it’s paid off.