Predating the sound of Animal Collective’s collaboration with folk singer Vashti Bunyan by nearly forty years, the song has also been acknowledged by Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett as a formative influence. I love the way the power of the words obviously commands the music and drives it beyond any consideration of time signature.” Czajkowski’s treatment of “God Is Alive” makes the song mesmerizing, but his pièce de résistance comes on the album’s closing cut, “Poppies.” Accompanied by a sparse acoustic guitar, Sainte-Marie’s voice becomes one with the synthesizer in a crystalline cave of electronic echoes. She describes her process in a section of her Web site: “I propped two pages of his book on a music stand and I just sang it out, ad libbing the melody and guitar music together as I went along. Sainte-Marie’s feverish reading of “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot,” a poem from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, was completed in a single take. Illuminations’ mind-expanding experience is bookended by its most imaginative songs. ![]() Propelled by a filthy, swaggering groove, “He’s a Keeper of the Fire” pays tribute to the bad boy in Sainte-Marie’s life, and she belts it out: “He’s got a funny kinda voodoo, baby / You oughta see him at the zoo / He’s got a heavy kinda hoodoo, baby / And he can lay it on you.” Less than two minutes into “With You, Honey,” the quartet lays down a stomping rhythm and squealing riffs while Sainte-Marie unleashes furious wails akin to Yoko Ono’s vocals in “Approximately Infinite Universe.” “Guess Who I Saw in Paris” is the languid calm in the eye of the storm, setting the stage for the album’s most raucous cut, and one of Sainte-Marie’s finest musical moments, “He’s a Keeper of The Fire.” Fans of that song include Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, who selected it for his MOJO Magazine compilation, Well… All Right! A 15-Track Musical Journey: on a track list that includes Black Mountain’s rendition of “No Satisfaction” and Nina Simone’s live version of “House of the Rising Sun,” Sainte-Marie fits right in. With both the introduction and commentary sections, each volume in the Illuminations series offers a big-picture understanding of the biblical book in question without sacrificing scholarly depth.Though Sainte-Marie’s new quartet performed only three of the twelve songs on Illuminations, the musicians’ contributions to the album’s hard-hitting sound are paramount. The commentary that follows the introduction provides a thorough accounting of the text in its original language and an engagement with other scholars. ![]() Most readers may find it sufficient to read this portion and turn to the following material only for reference. To that end, discussion of each portion of the text begins with the author’s introduction, written fluidly and with minimal use of foreign languages, technical jargon, reporting of alternative proposals, and citations of secondary literature. ![]() The volumes are designed to be accessible and enjoyable. The author of each volume employs the full range of biblical scholarship to illumine the text from a wide variety of perspectives, including the engagement and impact of the text through the centuries. The Illuminations Commentary Series is an innovative resource for all who are interested in engaging the Bible in depth.
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